Pocket FM promotes COO

Pocket FM has promoted founding team member Lalit Gangwar to chief operating officer as it pushes its audio business deeper into international markets. (analyticsinsight.net) Gangwar will run global business operations for the company’s audio division, with responsibility for growth, monetisation, execution and overall market performance, according to the company’s announcement published this week. Pocket FM said the role covers its business across multiple countries rather than a single domestic market. (analyticsinsight.net) The promotion lands two years after Pocket FM raised $103 million in a Series D round led by Lightspeed, with StepStone Group also participating. At the time, the company said it would use the money to expand in the United States and enter Europe and Latin America. (techcrunch.com) Pocket FM’s own site now describes the company as an audio-series platform with more than 200 million listeners worldwide. In November 2024, it said global revenue for fiscal year 2024 reached $127.05 million, up 496% from $21.3 million a year earlier, while losses fell 21% to $19.95 million. (pocketfm.com, businesswire.com) That combination of scale and tighter losses helps explain why Pocket FM is putting a single executive over cross-border operations now. The company said it is strengthening its operating foundation for “long-term, predictable growth” as it scales internationally. (analyticsinsight.net, businesswire.com) The business Pocket FM is building is not traditional podcasting or one-off audiobooks. It sells serialized audio fiction — long-running story shows broken into episodes — and has leaned on micropayments, subscriptions and advertising to turn listening time into revenue. (techcrunch.com, prnewswire.com) Pocket FM has also been reshaping how that content gets made. In 2025, the company rolled out AI tools for writers that help with tasks such as sharpening cliffhangers and revising story flow, part of a broader push to release more episodes faster. (pocketfm.com) Gangwar’s promotion suggests Pocket FM now sees the next challenge as less about proving demand and more about running a global content-and-payments machine at scale. The company has already spent the past four years moving from India into the US and beyond; this move puts one operator in charge of making that expansion pay. (sidley.com, analyticsinsight.net)