Once hailed as India’s Twitter substitute, Koo shuts down following negotiation breakdown
Co-founder Mayank Bidawatka stated on LinkedIn on Wednesday that the online business, which has a yellow bird as its emblem, has approached media outlets and internet corporations to buy it
Debt-ridden social media site Koo, which was originally positioned as an indigenous competitor of the multinational tech behemoth X (formerly Twitter), has closed its doors following several months of unsuccessful negotiations with potential owners.
Co-founder Mayank Bidawatka stated on LinkedIn on Wednesday that the online business, which has a yellow bird as its emblem, has approached media outlets and internet corporations to buy it. However, the conversations did not proceed as planned.
According to Bidawatka, the majority of these businesses did not want to deal with user-generated content or the “wild nature of a social media company.”
The co-founder said, “Although we would have preferred to keep the app running, the cost of technology services to keep a social media app running is high, so we’ve had to make this difficult decision.”
At its height, Koo had 2.1 million daily active users and was “just months away” from surpassing Twitter in India in 2022. However, Bidawatka claims that the extended financing winter led Koo to slow down its rate of growth.
When Aprameya Radhakrishnan and Bidawatka founded Koo in 2020, it was viewed as a domestic alternative to interact with the outside world.
A surge of users was attracted to the network, with 4.5 million users at its height in January 2021 thanks to support from well-known politicians like as former communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal.
In 2022, Statista estimates that there were roughly 24 million Twitter users in India.
Investors were drawn to Koo as well; Tiger Global and Accel contributed a combined $60 million. According to Tracxn, the company was worth $274 million in 2022.
But when the platform failed to monetarize and faced a severe cash shortage in the face of challenging macroeconomic conditions, things took a bad turn. Koo let off thirty-three of its 260 employees in April of last year in order to save money while looking into “strategic partnerships.”
According to regulatory filings, Koo had a loss of ₹197 crore on ₹14 lakh in operating revenue for the fiscal year 2021–2022. The company’s FY23 financial statements are still pending.
“Indian digital products are being made to international standards and it’s time to create global brands from India. As everyone knows, the startup ecosystem globally has witnessed a funding crunch without which Koo would have been on its way to rapid international market expansion,” Bidawatka had said in a LinkedIn post in February.
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