Lal Chand Bisu of Kuku FM believes in pumping up the volume

Mint

3 days ago

Preparing for this meeting with Lal Chand Bisu, co-founder of digital entertainment company Kuku FM, I started watching a popular microdrama on Kuku TV, an app launched by the company earlier this year for short-form fictional storytelling. The show, called Revenge of My Fake Boyfriend, turned out to be a slickly produced drama with a tight script and competent acting by fresh faces, aesthetically shot in a vertical video format. Each episode of the show, about a mega-rich girl fake-marrying a self-made businessman, was only about 2.5 minutes long, like all Kuku TV's microdramas—a new genre in India inspired by Korean and Chinese microdramas that the company is largely responsible for popularising over the past few months.
It occurred to me that there was a whole world of entertainment out there that people like me, hooked on British and American TV shows on Netflix and Amazon Prime, are completely unaware of. So when I meet Bisu, 35, at Kuku FM's office in Bengaluru's HSR Layout—the company occupies two floors in a co-working space—one of the first questions I ask is about this fragmentation of entertainment. 'This has been happening for a while. Even if you look at user-generated content on social media, your YouTube feed and mine will be completely different," says Bisu. He has no doubt, he says, that this is a good thing. 'Now this is happening in professionally made content, what we call premium content, as well. And it is the future of entertainment—because of the high number of content pieces, everyone will have a different feed and library."
The five-year-old company is generating content at a fast clip. While the older Kuku FM app contains thousands of audiobooks, talk shows, and audio dramas, mostly in regional Indian languages, the Kuku TV app is adding new videos every day (they added over 200 new shows, each between 1.5-2 hours long, just last month), with many of the hit microdramas on the platforms getting over 50 million views each. 'Indians had limited options to consume content, especially professionally made content. YouTube videos, Instagram Reels are all there, but they don't meet the demand for knowledge-based content or fiction and drama. We are close to releasing 10 shows every day on Kuku TV. Over time, based on people's choice and taste, they will get personalised and different feeds on the app," he says.
He does see it as a volume game, and talks about how with each transition in the way we consume entertainment, the net volume of content available to us viewers has jumped by several degrees. 'First we had movies releasing in theatres, right? One movie every Friday. Then came television—and with the growth of cable TV, the amount of content being produced jumped 100x. Then it was about streaming, and once again the viewer needed a lot more content because now they could choose what they wanted to watch. We are in the fourth transition now,when streaming has evolved into mobile-first premium content," he says.
In this world, content is treated primarily as a commodity that will be consumed like so many packets of biscuits or bhujiya—the snack food of art and entertainment, if you will. 'In mobile-first content, you need a high pace, because your thumb is literally 1 centimetre away from the screen and from the stop or back button… you can change it at any moment. And second, you need lots of content, because you can consume it any time —in the washroom, while travelling—and again the volume has jumped 100x. In every transition we needed 100x more content and that's what we are providing," he explains. This is also the logic behind the short-form content the company is focused on today, because it believes full-length films or episodes of shows are not ideal for quick, on-the-go consumption.
Valued at around $500 million, the company is currently in the market for a $70 million fund-raise as per media reports and is clocking around $10 million in revenue each month (Bisu did not confirm this). Monetisation has happened at a fast clip, driven by the ₹99 monthly subscription plan for Kuku FM and ₹499 for three months for Kuku TV. Starting at 250,000 paying users in 2021, it has crossed 10 million paid users today, reveals Bisu. Around 35% of their users are from tier-1 cities, while the bulk of the audience, at 45%, is from tier-2 cities, with the 25-35 age group over-represented in terms of the demographic of listeners.
Kuku FM started life as a podcast aggregator in 2018, co-founded by Bisu, Vinod Kumar Meena and Vikas Goyal—all three are alumni of IIT Jodhpur. 'At that time, audio content in India was almost entirely music. There was a lack of spoken-word content, especially in regional languages," says Bisu. Around 2016, when the launch of Reliance Jio brought high speed, cheap mobile data into the lives of millions of Indians for the first time, there was a growing hunger for content in all formats, and the founders zeroed in on audio seeing the gap in the category. 'In the early days, we experimented with a lot of things—self-help, biographies, summaries of popular English books. We realised very quickly that India's audience responds to storytelling in a very personal way and we ventured into fiction (in the form of audio dramas)—horror, fantasy, romance, all these genres became huge hits."
While the KukuFM app, among the top 10 free apps on the Google App Play Store today, still contains a considerable amount of non-fiction content, audio series are the fastest-growing segment across the category in which it exists, with competitors like Pocket FM (the current market leader) and Pratilipi FM. Indian listeners clearly can't get enough of serialised fiction, dramas, romance, thrillers, mythology, and biographies—all delivered in episodic, binge-listenable formats.
India's audio boom is well documented—a December 2023 survey by Pocket FM showed that Indian users spend over 140 minutes daily on audio series, with 81% of the over 20,000 users polled in the survey saying that they consume audio entertainment daily. Meanwhile, a 2024 report from Redseer indicated that the audio series segment has already captured an audience base at par with video-streaming and OTT platforms, with 10-11% of that base comprising paid users, Mint reported in April 2025.
Born and raised in the village of Bathoth in the Sikar district of Rajasthan, Bisu was among the first of his family to go to college. He met his co-founders at IIT Jodhpur, from where he graduated in 2012 and his co-founders in 2014. In 2013, he founded edtech startup EasyPrep, which Meena joined later. Based in Mumbai, the company, focused on providing multi-disciplinary test preparation for cracking competitive exams, was acquired by another edtech company, Toppr, in 2015 (Toppr was subsequently acquired by Byju's in 2021). Living in Mumbai was a big change for Bisu, who was not used to local trains and long commutes. To kill time as he travelled across Mumbai, he started listening to podcasts. 'I realised that it fit very well in my day-to-day life. I used to do a lot of exercise, and in Mumbai there was big commute time, so I would end up consuming more than two hours of podcasts daily...like Tim Ferris, Joe Rogan, and many podcasts related to the startup world. Most of them were American—there weren't that many Indian podcasts. And I thought 'yaar, yeh to tagda format hai' ('it's a solid format')."
This observation came back to him after the sale of EasyPrep, when he and his co-founders were looking around for a fresh idea. 'I started observing myself—what do I do in my day-to-day life, what impacts me? And usme se audio nikal ke aya (the answer was audio). And after almost a year, I connected the dots—I would create a product that I would consume myself, otherwise I will not start," he says. 'I was sure that though this is for a niche audience, the niche is quite big—there are so many people who do repeat tasks, from drivers to housewives—and they need something that they can consume while doing these tasks. Yes, there is no big audio culture in India—we will create that culture!"
The next wave of content—one that we are already in, by most accounts—is AI-generated. Bisu says that almost 70-80% of their work, at least at the conceptualising and writing level, is done by AI today. It is also used in voiceovers, translating content from one language to another and many other tasks—pretty much everything except the actual acting which is (still) done by humans in the microdramas. 'We start by thinking about the title. Then we write the plot. Then we write the script. Then we take it into audio and video. Finally, we make visual assets like thumbnails, marketing material, or episodic videos. So, in all these areas, AI plays a big role," he says. 'We have created our own AI tools and we use this native AI end to end."
He believes, however, that AI is a tool, much like search or email, and not a competitor for humans: 'You actually need better quality creative people who can use AI and give you more and better content...your AI output depends on the person who is sitting in front of the desktop. If you give AI tools to a mediocre creative guy, then you will get mediocre output," he says. 'And at the volumes we are producing, we can't do it without AI. We can't supply the need."