Kuku Raises USD 85 Million in Series C Led By Granite Asia Kuku now aims to create shows that surpass 100 million views.
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Vernacular content platform Kuku has raised USD 85 million in a series C round led by Granite Asia, a multi-asset investment platform. Vertex Growth Fund, Krafton, IFC, Paramark, Tribe Capital India, and Bitkraft also participated in the round.
Kuku says it will deploy the funding towards strengthening the company's AI and data infrastructure, hire more talent across technology and content, deepen creator partnerships and accelerate scaling efforts in India and beyond.
Founded in 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal, and Vinod Kumar Meena, Kuku is essentially an storytelling platform across multiple formats.
It offers KukuTV, which presents long-form stories as bite-sized episodes in a vertical micro drama format; and Kuku FM, which focuses on audio first shows. The company also has an in-house GenAI studio, which is aimed at leveraging the generative AI for purposes like multilingual translation, advertisement creation, and sentiment analysis.
"Kuku represents a new wave of Indian consumer platforms built on deep local insight and mobile-first innovation," Jenny Lee, Senior Managing Partner at Granite Asia, said in a press release. "We're excited to catalyze the team's vision to become India's leading storytelling platform ― drawing on our experience partnering with consumer tech leaders across Asia to turn local creativity into global platforms."
"Granite Asia's backing, combined with the trust of over 10 million paid subscribers position us for exceptional growth," said Kuku CEO Bisu. "With this investment, we'll bring celebrated actors and television personalities into our shows. This will build more and more shows that surpass 100 million views while delivering the premium content to our audience."
That said, Kuku's latest fundraise appears to be an extension to the earlier Series C round in September 2023 wherein it had raised USD 25 million from the Fundamentum Partnership and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), with participation from Vertex Ventures.
Before this, Kuku raised USD 21.8 million in a series B1 round from Fundamentum and Paramark, Krafton, 3one4 Capital, Vertex, Verlinvest and FounderBank Capital.
The company saw its revenue from operations rise 2.1x year-on-year to INR 88 crore in FY24, up from INR 41 crore in FY23, according to Entrackr. It also reduced its losses by 18% to INR 96 crore in FY24, down from INR 117 crore in FY23.
Kuku is looking to tap into India's micro story telling industry, which is expected to be worth USD 10 billion in the next five years. Its closest rival Pocketfm is also looking to raise up to USD 150 billion for global expansion. The company has roped in Goldman Sachs for the same, according to a Livemint report earlier this month.
Apart from Kuku and Pocket FM, there are a bunch of emerging startups that are looking to tap into the storytelling segment. Some of them are Story TV (Eloelo group), DashReels (Dashverse), QuickTV (ShareChat), and Reelies, among others.
