Koo, India’s homegrown microblogging platform, is shutting down its operations amid failed partnership talks and funding difficulties. The app, launched in 2020 as a rival to X (formerly Twitter), allowed users to post in multiple Indian languages.
Founders of the app, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka confirmed the news through a LinkedIn post. “We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses, but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” according to the founders.
Koo has raised over USD 60 million from investors, including Tiger Global, Accel, 3One4 Capital, Mirae Asset and Blume. Back in February, the firm was reportedly in talks with Dailyhunt for a merger, but the partnership didn’t pan out. The founders also mentioned that a couple of deals were reverted close to signing from other parties.
Koo at its peak clocked approximately 60 million downloads, 10 million monthly active users, 2.1 million daily active users, 10 million posts per month, and had 9000+ celebrities and VIPs as users. Lack of steady capital made the firm fall short of its goals to beat its competitors in the tough social media space.
Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Founders of Koo said,
Here’s the final update from our end. Our partnership talks fell through and we will be discontinuing our service to the public. We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted. Most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company. A couple of them changed priority almost close to signing. While we would’ve liked to keep the app running, the cost of technology services to keep a social media app running is high and we’ve had to take
this tough decision.A prolonged funding winter which hit us at our peak hurt our plans at the time and we had to tone down on our growth trajectory.