Kuku wants a $1.8B IPO for India's 2-minute drama boom

Kuku Technologies has confidentially filed draft papers with SEBI for an IPO that could raise ₹2,500 crore to ₹3,500 crore and target a valuation near ₹15,000 crore, about $1.8 billion. The Bengaluru company behind Kuku FM, Kuku TV, and Guru declined to comment. The money story underneath the filing is blunt: India is being asked to price two-minute vernacular melodrama the way platforms get priced, not the way one-off content bets get priced.

The growth engine is Kuku TV, the vertical microdrama app launched in late 2024. The company says it is shipping more than 150 originals a month, has crossed 200 million downloads on that product alone, and claims more than 10 million paying subscribers and 400 million downloads across the full suite. Kuku FM still supplies the audio base. Guru covers edutainment. Founders Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Kumar Meena, and Vikas Goyal, IIT Jodhpur classmates who started the company in 2018, are pitching AI-assisted production as the way to keep that volume moving across Hindi and other Indian languages.

Public filings already show how expensive the climb has been. In FY25, operating revenue reached roughly ₹242 crore while net loss widened to about ₹153 crore, with advertising alone near ₹285 crore. People familiar with the IPO process have pointed to a near sevenfold jump toward more than ₹1,400 crore in FY26 revenue and a path close to breakeven. Those newer figures will matter more once a public DRHP is out. Until then, treat them as the pitch, not the audited floor.

Investors have already marked the category up. A Granite Asia-led Series C closed at $85 million in October 2025 and valued the company around $550 million post-money, with Krafton, IFC, Vertex, and others still in the cap table. In March 2026, MS Dhoni joined as an investor and as Kuku TV's brand ambassador, the kind of celebrity co-sign that turns a vernacular app into a national conversation. Lead managers named in reporting include Kotak Mahindra Capital, Jefferies, JM Financial, and Axis Capital.

The category math is why the valuation ask feels aggressive and also why it is not random. Lumikai has pegged India's microdrama market near $300 million with a path toward $4.5 billion by 2030. China already ran the format into a double-digit-billion business. In India, FICCI–EY has put Kuku TV, Story TV, and Quick TV into the top download ranks ahead of Netflix, ZEE5, and SonyLIV on installs. Installs are not revenue. Still, JioHotstar's Tadka lane, ZEE5's Bullet push, YRF's microdrama spend, and Excel's short-form unit show the incumbents are no longer treating this as a sideshow.

Risks travel with the raise. Pocket FM has sued parent Mebigo Labs over alleged IP copying, and Delhi High Court has already restricted streaming of specific disputed titles. AI claims will get harder once public-market disclosure starts: assistive tooling is one story, end-to-end fabrication is another. The competitive set is also getting richer and better distributed by the month.

Our read: Kuku is not asking India to buy a cute format. It is asking investors to underwrite a mobile-first, vernacular, paid-subscription machine that already out-downloads long-form OTT on the install charts and wants capital for AI infrastructure, content velocity, and overseas expansion. If the listing clears near that $1.8 billion ask, microdrama stops being a China import story and becomes Indian public-market infrastructure. If it slips, the lesson will be just as clear: downloads travel faster than durable ARPU.