Saarey Music is the music streaming service for South Asian classical music that gives you unlimited ad-free access to exclusive human curated high quality and authentic content.

Faraan Irfan, Founder and Chief Executive of Saarey Music, grew up immersed in South Asian classical music and witnessed its powerful ability to enrich lives. Early on, he recognised a major gap: access to high-quality recordings was limited, and there was no dedicated streaming service for this genre.

What started as just an idea began to take real shape when Saarey Music became part of Creative Catalyst – the £30 million funding programme from Innovate UK designed to support high-potential businesses in the UK. The support provided a crucial boost, helping Saarey grow into a fully-fledged business with the foundation needed for long-term growth.

Now dubbed the “Spotify for South Asian classical music,” Saarey Music is filling that market gap for hundreds of millions of fans across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the US, and the UK. The platform holds exclusive rights to nearly 90% of all Pakistani classical music – content that can’t be found on any other streaming service.

Faraan said: “Before the funding, it was just an idea. It was something that I’d thought of, my team had thought of and the artists had thought of – we all knew it should be happening. We just didn’t know how to go about it. We needed the resources to do it. In came Innovate UK’s Creative Catalyst grant and that helped us get started.”

The impact of Innovate UK support

Faaran added: “Since we won the grant, we’ve opened an office in India and our revenues have been growing an average of 30% month on month. We were selected by Forbes India as one of the top 200 companies in the world this year and Fast Company selected us as the ninth most innovative in Europe, Middle East and Africa.”

The funding helped Faraan turn his vision for Saarey Music into reality – but the Creative Catalyst programme offered much more than financial support.

Through the Global Business Innovation Programme (GBIP), Faraan attended Slush in Helsinki, gaining valuable international exposure. In addition, workshops on pitching and storytelling have helped shape Saarey’s narrative to ensure it resonates powerfully with audiences and investors alike.

Faaran said: “We were able to meet incredible people who are doing incredible work, through the peer network and our mentors and advisors. We’ve been able to articulate our story, much better than we would have otherwise. Our story now resonates with people, whether they are investors, people joining the team or users, and that has made a huge difference.”

A key highlight was connecting with an expert who helped significantly reduce audio latency – the delay between the audio source and output – on Saarey’s platform.

Faaran commented: “One of the people I met on the programme has incredible expertise in networking engineering and he shared knowledge with me on how we could refine and optimise the delivery of the audio streaming to our users. Even though I have a computer sciences background, his knowledge has made such a huge impact. It’s brought down our delivery time, or latency, from about four seconds to less than half a millisecond.”

The future

Saarey’s long-term goal is to become the go-to platform for all things South Asian classical music – whether users want to stream music, hire artists for events, book lessons, or even order instruments. As Faraan explains, these services are “shockingly still very difficult to access” within the genre.

Being part of the Creative Catalyst programme has enabled the company to take a significant step toward that vision, especially in positioning the business for future investment and growth.

Faraan said: “Innovate UK is a really important stamp of approval. When investors look at the fact that Innovate UK has supported us, believes in us and has done the due diligence on what we’re doing, it builds confidence. That means the likelihood of investors funding the businesses increases significantly.”