Singapore’s Granite Asia, formerly GGV Capital, announced that it has led an $85 million Series C funding round for Kuku, an Indian mobile-first vernacular content platform.
Other participants in the round included Vertex Growth Fund, Krafton, International Finance Corporation (IFC), Paramark, Tribe Capital India, and Bitkraft, per the announcement.
Founded in 2018 by Lal Chand Bisu, Vikas Goyal, and Vinod Kumar Meena, Kuku operates KukuTV, which produces serialised vertical micro-dramas, and Kuku FM, an audio-first platform offering entertainment and knowledge content across more than eight Indian languages.
The company said it plans to use the new capital to strengthen its AI and data infrastructure, hire more talent, and deepen partnerships with content creators.
Kuku said it has developed an in-house generative AI studio to streamline the content production process, from ideation and scripting to multilingual translation and sentiment analysis, cutting costs and turnaround time.
It also plans to bring well-known actors and television personalities into its original shows to expand viewership.
“With this investment, we’ll bring celebrated actors and television personalities into our shows. This will build more and more shows that surpass 100 million views while delivering premium content to our audience,” said Kuku founder and CEO Lal Chand Bisu.
Granite Asia Senior Managing Partner Jenny Lee said Kuku represented “a new wave of Indian consumer platforms built on deep local insight and mobile-first innovation.”
“We’re excited to catalyse the team’s vision to become India’s leading storytelling platform, drawing on our experience partnering with consumer tech leaders across Asia to turn local creativity into global platforms,” Lee said.
India’s short-form audio and video content market is expected to reach about $2 billion annually within five years, driven by widespread smartphone adoption, low data costs, and a seamless digital payment system, Kuku said.
The platform currently serves more than 10 million paid subscribers and aims to become India’s largest storytelling platform and a global exporter of local culture and history.
The funding round comes as India’s startup ecosystem witnessed a modest recovery in investor activity in September 2025, as private equity and venture capital funding rose to $1.14 billion from $1.1 billion in August.
Deal volume rose in tandem, from 92 to 108, reflecting cautious optimism among investors, according to DealStreetAsia’s September India Deal Review.
