Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA is in talks to again Pocket FM in a big new spherical of funding, two sources acquainted with the matter advised TechCrunch, because the Indian audio-storytelling platform makes deeper inroads within the U.S.

The talks for the brand new spherical, which have been ongoing for greater than a month, follows Pocket FM lately securing about $100 million in a separate spherical of funding from Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, the sources stated, requesting anonymity as the main points aren’t but public.

TechCrunch reported about Lightspeed Enterprise Companions partaking to put money into Pocket FM final yr. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s talks with ADIA and closure of its current spherical haven’t been beforehand reported.

The funding deliberations comply with a fast-paced income development on the Indian startup, which gives serialized fiction and non-fiction content material spanning genres like romance, self-help and motivation. Its annualized income runrate in direction of the top of final yr had exceeded $160 million, TechCrunch beforehand reported, a six-to-seven instances enhance over a yr in the past.

ADIA didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark, whereas Pocket FM stated it refrains from commenting on market speculations.

Pocket FM — which additionally counts Tencent, Tanglin and Occasions Web amongst its backers — had publicly set a objective of reaching an ARR of $100 million by 2023-end.

Picture credit: Bain

Indian startups skilled a major decline in large-scale funding rounds final yr as distinguished crossover funds, together with Tiger International and SoftBank, lowered their investments in India and different markets, whereas many well-known India-focused funds shifted their consideration to backing early-stage startups, Bain stated this week.

A number of sovereign funds, together with ADIA, Temasek, GIC, Qatar Funding Authority, ramped up the tempo of their investments final yr, slicing large-check sizes to late-stage startups reminiscent of PhonePe, Lenskart, and Pharmeasy.

Pocket FM’s enlargement into the U.S., and providing prospects a non-subscription, pay-as-you-go providing has confirmed particularly profitable. Pocket FM operates on a freemium mannequin, leveraging long-form episodic storytelling to provide customers the selection to pay just for content material they like quite than all the library.

This method has allowed the startup to supply free entry to episodes each 24 hours, with a charge for extra content material. Since early 2022, the platform has employed a micro-transaction mannequin, enabling customers to buy cash in native forex to redeem for episodes past the free quota. On common, listeners spend over 110 minutes day by day on the platform, TechCrunch beforehand reported.

The startup introduced final month that it’ll make investments $40 million to develop its on-line studying platform Pocket Novel. Greater than 90,000 writers had signed as much as the app in lower than a month, Pocket FM co-founder Rohan Nayak wrote on LinkedIn this week.