IIT Kharagpur
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🎙️ Waves of Sound: The Pocket FM Story

In the heart of Bengaluru, where tech dreams take flight and coffee fuels code, three friends from IIT Kharagpur—Rohan Nayak, Nishanth KS, and Prateek Dixit—sat in a modest apartment that doubled as an office. It was 2018, and the air buzzed with ambition.

The trio had met at IIT Kharagpur, where they bonded over sleepless nights, shared meals, and dreams bigger than the campus itself. Rohan, who graduated in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 2012, had always been fascinated by storytelling and user behavior. Nishanth, a 2012 Computer Science graduate, was the quiet coder with a knack for scalable systems. And Prateek, graduating the same year in Mechanical Engineering, brought a product designer’s mind with an engineer’s grit.

During a catch-up call in late 2017, the friends lamented how hard it was to find quality audio entertainment in Indian languages. Radio felt outdated, and podcasts hadn’t caught fire in India. But the hunger for stories was timeless—people still craved drama, romance, thrillers, and relatable voices.

“What if we build something like Netflix,” Rohan said, “but for audio?”

That was the spark. And thus began Pocket FM—a platform to bring India’s rich tradition of oral storytelling to the digital age. They poured their savings into building the MVP, often sleeping on beanbags and taking turns brewing chai. Rohan shaped the content strategy, Nishanth built the tech stack, and Prateek obsessed over every user flow and interaction. What started as an ambitious idea for the Indan market is now a $127.05 million powerhouse with enromous growth in the USA as well. 

Their big break came with a romantic thriller series in Hindi that gained 100,000 listeners in a week. Word spread. Soon, creators from across India were pitching content in Tamil, Bengali, Marathi. They expanded rapidly, fueled by a mission: to empower regional creators and make storytelling accessible to all.

By 2025, Pocket FM had become a household name, offering thousands of hours of audio content, personalized to taste, mood, and language. What started as an idea among three IITKGPians became a revolution in Indian entertainment—one story, one voice, and one listener at a time. 

And in every episode, echoing through earbuds and car speakers across the country, was a whisper of that small room in Bengaluru, where three friends decided to give India its own voice.

🎧 How did three 27-year-olds go from zero to building one of India’s most exciting global startups? 

IITKGPFAI Leadership Lecture Series Features Dr. Chirodeep Bakli

IITKGP Alumni Foundation (India) cordially invites alumni to a special session of the IITKGPAFI Leadership Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Chirodeep Bakli (B.Tech/2000; PhD/2016), an expert in micro/nanoscale fluid mechanics and interfacial transport phenomena. His work bridges fundamental thermofluid science with applications in energy systems, diagnostics, and sustainable technology. He led the IITKGP team in developing a ‘graphene-based’ technology that could change the way the world tackles oil spills, which wreak havoc on aquatic biodiversity. This innovative work was recently featured in the Times of India.

Date: 26th April, 2025
Time: 05:00 PM IST (6:30 AM CST; 7:30 AM ET)
Registration Link: Zoom
Live on YouTube

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