Kuku FMThe Story
Kuku Technologies is building a 1,000-member AI-led content production unit in Mumbai, according to people familiar with the matter, as it prepares for a public listing.
The company has hired close to 200 people for the unit and plans to reach around 1,000 by the end of the current financial year. It is recruiting writers, filmmakers and engineers into a single team. Writers develop stories and dialogue, filmmakers handle visual direction, and engineers build the AI systems, including tools that maintain narrative continuity across long-running series.
Kuku has confidentially filed draft papers with SEBI for an issue of up to ₹3,500 crore, targeting a valuation of around ₹15,000 crore, or $1.8 billion, with a listing expected later this fiscal year. The issue is expected to combine a fresh issue with an offer for sale. Proceeds are earmarked for technology and AI infrastructure, content production and geographic expansion.
The parent of vernacular audio platform Kuku FM, short-video app Kuku TV and the edutainment platform Guru was founded in 2018 by IIT alumni Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Kumar and Vikas Goyal. It claims more than 10 million active paying subscribers, 400 million app downloads and a library exceeding 60,000 hours across several Indian languages.
Kuku TV, launched in late 2024, has become the growth engine. It has crossed 200 million downloads and releases more than 150 original microdramas a month, in episodes of two to three minutes.
Revenue grew close to sevenfold in FY26, to more than ₹1,400 crore from ₹240 crore, and the company is said to be approaching breakeven. It has raised over $150 million from investors including Fundamentum, Krafton, Vertex Ventures, Granite Asia, IFC, Paramark Ventures, India Quotient and 3one4 Capital.
Why It Matters
An AI-led production unit that employs a thousand people is worth reading twice.
Every automation story of the past month has run the other way. Zomato closed a support centre and cut 250 roles. Uber removed 3,300. Ford's India centre said it would hire around 500 specialists next year rather than the thousands it once pledged. In each case AI, or the operating logic built around it, reduced headcount.
Kuku is doing the reverse, and the reason lies in what the technology is being applied to.
Microdrama is a hit-driven format. Nobody knows which two-minute series will work until it ships, so the economics depend on the volume of attempts rather than the accuracy of any single judgement. Kuku already releases more than 150 originals a month. Lowering the cost per attempt does not reduce the number of people required. It raises the optimal number of attempts, and each attempt still needs someone to write and direct it.
That is the distinction most commentary on AI and employment skips past. Where automation reduces unit cost in a market with fixed demand, employment falls. Customer support tickets are the clearest case, because nobody wants more of them, so cheaper handling means fewer handlers. Where demand for variety is effectively unbounded, output expands faster than productivity and employment rises.
The Strategic Read
The revenue makes the claim credible rather than promotional.
₹240 crore to more than ₹1,400 crore in a single year is close to sevenfold, and it coincides with Kuku TV finding the microdrama format. That is not a company assembling an AI narrative for a prospectus. Something in the production model changed and the output moved with it.
The caution sits in the same numbers. A ₹15,000 crore target on ₹1,400 crore of revenue is roughly ten times sales, for a business approaching breakeven rather than at it, on a growth record one year long. Microdrama is a format, and formats carry fashion risk. The prospectus will have to show whether the second year of Kuku TV compounds or reverts, because a single sevenfold year is a spectacular data point and still a single data point.
Committing to a thousand-person unit before that is settled is a real undertaking. Two hundred are already in place. The remaining eight hundred are salaries incurred ahead of the revenue meant to justify them, in the same window as a listing.
The wider read is more encouraging than most of what has crossed this desk lately. Indian technology companies keep ending up in the layer that gets disintermediated. Insurtech built on distribution while global capital went to underwriting. Space startups building payloads while launch capability went to conglomerates. Consumer platforms whose advantage was an information asymmetry regulators are now dismantling.
Vernacular content is not that. Language diversity, low production cost and a domestic audience of scale are structural advantages that do not transfer easily to a foreign competitor, and the format has already been proven at enormous scale in China. If AI genuinely lowers the cost of producing watchable short-form drama in a dozen Indian languages, the resulting business is defensible in a way distribution never was.
That is a large if, and it is the one the IPO will be priced on.
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