Audio OTT Startup Headfone Raises $10 Mn To Diversify Content Offerings

Audio OTT startup Headfone has raised $10 Mn in Series B funding round led by Elevation Capital. The round saw participation from existing investor Hashed and new angel investors including Hotstar’s Ajit Mohan, Google’s Anshumani Ruddra and comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath. 

The fresh capital will help Headfone diversify content offerings across languages and expand into genres beyond comedy, films and TV, education, social and culture, poetry, health, kids, and religion and spirituality. 

Founded in 2018 by Pratham Khandelwal and Yogesh Sharma, Headfone is a decentralised online platform where multiple artists such as writers, voice actors and sound engineers can collaborate with each other to create audio dramas. The platform currently offers content in Hindi. 

Headfone has reported that the cost of producing a content piece on the platform is INR 100 per minute as compared to INR 7000 per minute on other audio platforms. Also, it takes 2-3 days to create an episode on the platform. 

Headfone further claims to have 3 Mn monthly active users with 52 minutes as average daily time spent per active user on the app. There are a total of 800,000 content pieces on the platform, which has been growing at a 10% CMGR for the past two years.

In January 2021, Headfone raised INR 22 Cr ($3 Mn) as a part of its Series A funding round led by Hashed. The round saw participation from a new investor Radish Fiction’s Seung Yoon Lee and existing investors including Axilor Ventures and Fosun RZ Capital. 

In July 2019, Headphone raised $750K in seed funding round led by Fosun RZ Capital, an affiliate of Fosun Group.

In recent times, many Indian players including Kuku FM, Clubhouse, Khabri, Serial Box and Pocket FM have entered into the OTT segment. According to a KPMG report on the media and entertainment industry, the Indian audio streaming market comprises 200 Mn MAU, of whom just 1% are paid subscribers.

While Statista report forecasts that India’s audio OTT market was worth $600 Mn in 2021, and will grow up to $1.1 Bn by 2025, and to $2.5 Bn by 2030.

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