The ambition is audacious: produce 4,000 movies a month, create more than 10 lakh jobs in India and build a global premium-content business from the country. For Lal Chand Bisu and Vinod Kumar Meena, co-founders of Kuku Technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) could make all three possible.
The company, which began its journey in the education space in 2012, has turned profitable in FY2026. It currently releases around 400 movies a month and is looking to scale that output tenfold, with AI expected to play a central role in transforming the economics of content production.
But the founders’ story is as much about experimentation, recognising consumer behaviour and being comfortable with uncertainty as it is about technology.
In an interview with Storyboard18’s editor Delshad Irani, Bisu and Meena discussed their journey from Jodhpur to Mumbai, the evolution of their mobile-first entertainment strategy, their approach to microdramas and the possibilities AI could unlock for India’s creative economy.
From Jodhpur to Mumbai: The early lessons
The founders started their entrepreneurial journey shortly after college in 2012, building an education business out of Jodhpur.
Although they were unable to scale that venture, the experience gave them an early understanding of how audiences consume content online and what it takes to build products around consumer behaviour.
At the time, India had only around 30-40 million internet users, but the founders believed that the numbers would eventually grow and create opportunities to reach hundreds of millions of people.
“That was our initial learning, schooling in the content space,” Bisu said, describing how the experience taught them to understand customers and their content preferences.
Their move to Mumbai in 2015 coincided with a significant transformation in India’s internet landscape. The expansion of affordable mobile internet access following Jio brought millions of consumers online, primarily through smartphones.
The founders began noticing that mobile audiences behaved differently from people consuming entertainment on television, computers or in cinemas.
They had themselves been consumers of premium content, but realised that watching long-form films and series on mobile phones was not always convenient.
They believed that premium entertainment would eventually need to adapt to the way people were already consuming content on social media: in short, available slots throughout the day.
“We connected the dots that premium content consumption will also happen in the same state. People will consume content in their slots,” Bisu added.
That insight became central to Kuku’s mobile-first strategy.
The science of microgenres: Why even humiliation has 50 variations
One of the most distinctive aspects of Kuku’s content strategy is the extent to which it breaks down storytelling into increasingly granular categories.
Rather than relying only on broad genres such as romance, horror, action or fantasy, the company examines individual emotions, narrative arcs, situations and hooks that make audiences engage with a story.
The founders said that as the company’s content library expanded, its understanding of audience preferences also became more detailed.
They cited the example of a popular rags-to-riches narrative, explaining how the company had broken down the element of humiliation into 50 different types.
“We divided 50 kinds of humiliation,” the founders said, describing how even a single emotion could be explored through multiple storytelling variations.
The idea is to identify the specific emotional triggers that work and combine them in different ways to develop new stories.
Meena elaborated. A rivalry between two sisters, complicated by a love triangle, for instance, could be set in a college, a Victorian-era environment or even the world of figure skating. The underlying premise remains familiar, but the characters, circumstances and fictional universe change.
Some of these microgenres are so specific that they do not even have names.
The company uses insights from its content library to understand which combinations resonate with audiences and inform the development of subsequent stories.
This approach to storytelling is central to its ambition to expand content production without relying exclusively on conventional formats and genre classifications.
From 400 to 4,000 movies a month
Kuku currently releases approximately 400 movies a month and plans to increase that number to 4,000.
The founders believe this expansion would be difficult to achieve through conventional production methods alone.
Historically, the number of films and series that could be produced was constrained by the time, money and people required to make them. While distribution evolved from cinemas to television and streaming, production capacity remained relatively limited.
AI, they believe, could fundamentally change that equation.
The founders envisage a future in which premium entertainment becomes as abundant and personalised as social media content.
“Instead of four, you will get 4,000 or 4 lakh movies in a month,” Bisu said, describing the potential scale of the transformation.
They also foresee interactive storytelling becoming more mainstream, with audiences potentially entering stories and becoming characters themselves.
“You might be the hero in that content, and your friends might be the side characters,” they added.
However, the founders acknowledged that this transition could initially create challenges, particularly around the quality of AI-generated content.
The rapid expansion of production could lead to a flood of low-quality material, commonly described as AI slop.
One of the founders pointed to the limitations of existing systems in filtering content at scale.
“The current ecosystem that we have is equipped to filter X amount of content through UGC and X channels. But now with AI, how do you differentiate good content from bad content? And how do you control AI slop?” he said.
The founders believe recommendation and filtering systems will eventually become more sophisticated, allowing audiences to discover better-quality productions amid the abundance.
AI could create more than 10 lakh jobs in India
While AI is expected to automate several aspects of content production, the founders believe its longer-term impact on employment could be substantial.
They estimate that India alone could support more than 10 lakh people creating content through AI, with productions catering to audiences across international markets.
“That’s our estimation that in India only I think we can employ 10 lakh plus employees who will create content through AI and we can supply globally that content,” the founders said.
The founders argue that AI will reduce traditional barriers between technical and creative skills, allowing more people to participate in content creation.
Kuku is already experimenting with this approach through fellowship programmes that bring together writers, directors, people working with AI-assisted coding and other candidates interested in learning new skills.
Participants undergo a month-long training programme and are paid during the learning period. The company said it offers full-time positions to more than half of those who complete the programme.
“We are hiring both, but we are focusing more on the content side of things,” Meena said.
They believe that people willing to learn how to use AI tools effectively can take on tasks that would previously have required specialised technical expertise.
The founders cited the example of junior employees who, despite having limited coding knowledge, built an internal tool within three weeks using AI. The tool has since become an important resource for the company in addressing customer requests.
For them, the lesson is that willingness to experiment and solve problems matters more than conventional definitions of expertise.
“The attitude should always be, can I do it myself before going to an expert and asking them to do it for me?” they said.
Why India could become a global content production hub
The founders see parallels between the opportunity in AI-enabled entertainment and the growth of India’s IT services industry.
They believe India has the population, English-speaking talent pool and cost advantages required to serve global entertainment markets.
“I want to make India a powerhouse of premium storytelling,” Bisu said.
They believe AI will make it possible to create content for different countries while adapting the cultural details of individual productions.
Teams sitting in India could develop stories for audiences in the United States, Indonesia or the Middle East, adjusting the setting, clothing, names and other cultural elements to suit individual markets.
“You can actually choose the culture, clothes, name, street, whatever.”
The founders also pointed to China and South Korea as examples of more developed creative ecosystems.
They said these markets had built stronger links between educational institutions, content creators and distribution platforms, allowing people to understand what was working in the market and develop their skills accordingly.
One aspect that particularly struck them was the revenue-sharing model in parts of the Korean and Chinese webtoon ecosystem, where even junior contributors involved in a production could receive a share of its revenue.
The founders believe India needs to develop a similar ecosystem in which people working across the creative value chain can build sustainable careers.
They see AI as an opportunity to combine India’s storytelling heritage with new production capabilities and serve audiences well beyond the domestic market.
Why Kuku believes microdramas are here to stay
Kuku’s founders do not see microdramas as a temporary response to shorter attention spans.
They argue that the format is part of a broader shift in how audiences consume entertainment on mobile devices.
Drawing a distinction between user-generated content and professionally generated content, they said the same audiences that spend time watching Reels and TikTok-style videos also seek premium entertainment.
“Microdrama is the premium side of Reels or TikTok,” the founders said.
They compared the evolution of the format with the emergence of streaming services following the growth of online video platforms.
In their view, audiences will continue to consume both user-generated and professionally produced entertainment, depending on their preferences and the time available.
The founders also believe Kuku has an advantage because of its experience in audio storytelling.
In markets such as China and South Korea, they said, successful web novels often provide the foundation for webtoons and microdramas. India, however, has a comparatively weaker reading culture.
Kuku believes its audio audience and the data generated through its platforms allow it to identify promising stories before adapting them into video.
“We are able to filter down these scripts much better than others in the market, because we know this is a script out of hundreds, which has worked better, or thousands which has worked better,” Meena said.
The founders also believe their mobile-first approach gives them an advantage over traditional entertainment businesses that may find it harder to adapt to a different production and consumption model.
However, they acknowledged that no business is immune to disruption. One founder said the same challenge that legacy entertainment companies face today could eventually confront Kuku itself.
Hiring for ownership, not just expertise
The company’s changing approach to content production is also influencing how its founders think about leadership and talent.
They said they increasingly look for people with high agency, ownership and the willingness to use AI to solve problems independently.
The founders believe the number of people required to complete a task is shrinking, making it more important for employees to take responsibility for an entire project rather than specialise in one narrow function.
They also acknowledged that younger employees have different expectations from employers.
“They are much more hardworking, but at the same time, more impatient as well,” Meena said.
He added that younger employees want recognition for their work, opportunities to take ownership and the flexibility to work in intense sprints followed by periods of downtime.
For the founders, managing this generation requires companies to adapt while creating systems that reward effort and recognise performance.
The biggest lesson: Start building before you are ready
For Bisu and Meena, some of the most important lessons in entrepreneurship have come not from formal education but from building businesses, making mistakes and learning through experimentation.
Asked what their early lives had taught them that no business school could, one of the founders spoke about the importance of starting early and becoming comfortable with uncertainty.
“Building things. It was not in formal education, it was not in schools. It is part of actually your hobby or ambition. We started building things, started doing mistakes much earlier in our life,” Bisu said.
The founders said they continue to approach their business with the same experimental mindset, even after years of building Kuku.
“We are taking risks and doing ten experiments out of ten. One or two we will succeed,” the founder said.
For them, the ability to accept failure and continue experimenting is essential to building a business in an industry undergoing such rapid change.
Their ambition is not simply to build a large entertainment platform. They want to create an industry that generates employment at scale and establishes India as a global destination for premium storytelling.
Asked what they would want future generations to remember about Kuku, one founder said he hoped the company would be recognised for having helped create an industry and generated millions of jobs.
The other ambition was equally expansive: making India a global premium-content creation powerhouse.
For a company that began with an education venture in Jodhpur and is now betting on AI to transform entertainment, the journey is still unfolding. Its founders’ approach, however, remains consistent: build, experiment, learn from failure and keep pushing the scale of what is possible.