Further, ropes in former ShareChat communications executive Rahul Nag to lead its external & internal communications, and talent branding
May 18, 2022: Pocket FM, a personalized audio streaming service, has announced Shubh Bansal’s appointment as VP-Growth and Rahul Nag as Head – of Communications. With these appointments, the company would intensify its focus to accelerate revenue, speed up growth initiatives, and elevate its brand positioning.
With Pocket FM witnessing exponential growth in listener engagement, content creation, and monetization, Bansal will be leading the business growth initiatives across listeners, and new business opportunities. He was a co-founder at Truebil, an auto-tech platform acquired by Spinny where he was responsible for spearheading growth, marketing, and revenue. Before Truebil, he was associated with Housing.com.
Nag will be driving stakeholder engagement through external, social media, and internal communications along with establishing Pocket FM as a culture-first internet organization. With over a decade and half years of experience in the communications landscape, he has worked with organisations like Flock, Mindtree, and ShareChat. In his earlier roles, he has led the crisis communication for Mindtree during the L&T takeover conflict and contributed immensely to leading the communications for ShareChat and Moj.
Both Bansal and Nag will be reporting to Rohan Nayak, CEO, and co-founder, of Pocket FM. Welcoming them, Nayak said, “As we continue our exponential growth curve on the backdrop of a unique storytelling experience, we are bullish on our market leadership in pioneering the ‘audio entertainment’ space. Both Shubh and Rahul are proven leaders in their space and are valuable inclusions into our strategic team. With their strong skill sets and expertise, we hope they will bring the required momentum to our growth, revenue and brand recall as we continue to build Pocket FM for our community.”
These key appointments come amidst Pocket FM scaling up rapidly. The upward curve highlights an aggressive growth trajectory for the company and reflects an increasing trend in audio content consumption on the internet. Over the past few months, along with aggressive listener growth, Pocket FM has aggressively focused on monetization and content diversity.
Commenting on his appointment, Shubh Bansal, VP-Growth said, “It gives me immense pleasure to work with a company that is pioneering and leading the audio-entertainment category in the OTT space. Our vision is to build category leadership for Pocket FM and lead the OTT landscape through our product innovations and business acumen. I am thankful to the founders for their trust and confidence bestowed upon me, and we will together take Pocket FM to newer milestones.”
Joining Pocket FM, Rahul Nag, Head – Communications, said, “I have always been a great believer in audio-first digital content and it always feels special to have the opportunity to contribute to the leader in the space. Our objective is not just to lead India but become a strong force to reckon with, and we are hopeful of emerging as a stronger brand for our listeners, creators, employees, and investors.”
With over 100,000 hours of audio content, Pocket FM has been consistently expanding its content diversity and adding new series and content to keep its listeners tuned in. The company further kept bolstering its 200,000-strong thriving creator community comprised of professional user-generated content (PUGC) writers and voice artists.
Pocket FM is leading the audio OTT space with over 15 million monthly active listeners (MAL) and witnessing over 3 billion minutes of audio streaming every month. The daily average listener time spent on the app has already surpassed 100 minutes.
Recently, the company has raised US$65 million in Series C funding to double down on its strategic priorities of building AI capabilities, multiplying its listeners base with new languages and strengthening its creator community. The company has already hired senior executives to address these priorities and continues to look for talents in the product and tech space aggressively.
Pocket FM has raised US$93.6 million to date and is backed by some marquee investors like Lightspeed, Times Group, Tanglin Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, and Naver.
