New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) Koo, the Indian replica of Twitter (now X), is shutting down operations, its co-founders announced on Wednesday blaming the platform’s failed attempts at partnerships and harsh funding winter for the closure.
The announcement brings curtains down on Koo – which was launched in 2000 and whose popularity in India soared around 2021 following the Indian government’s spat with X (then Twitter). Back then, amid growing calls for expanding the ecosystem of homegrown digital platforms, several Union ministers, politicians and government departments had signed up on Koo.
In the days of its heady growth, Koo snapped up about 2.1 million daily active users and about 10 million monthly active users, and had marquee investors like Tiger Global, Accel, 3one4 Capital, and Kalaari Capital backing it.
However, prolonged funding winter and failed acquisition talks took a toll on the platform which later struggled with dwindling user base and resorted to layoffs, last year.
In a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday, co-founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced that the platform will be discontinuing its services to the public and that the little yellow bird is bidding a final goodbye (a reference to Koo’s logo).
“We explored partnership with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” the two co-founders wrote.
Flagging the unsuccessful attempts at partnerships, the co-founders said, while most did not 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.
The duo said they would have liked to keep the app running but then “the cost of technology services to keep social media app running is high” and hence the “tough decision”.
Koo, they said, was built with a “lot of heart” to “democratise expression” and enable a better way to connect people in their local languages (at its prime, the platform supported multiple Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Assamese and Punjabi).
“Most global products are dominated by Americans. We believe that India should have a place at the table,” the co-founders said.
They asserted that Koo was just months away from beating Twitter in India in 2022, but rued that lack of capital brought the platform’s ambitious march, to a halt.
According to the two co-founders, Koo was a globally scalable product built in a fraction of the time as X “with superior systems, algorithms and strong stakeholder first philosophies”.
A funding winter, however, hit the company at its peak, hurting plans and forcing the platform to “tone down” its growth trajectory.
“Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue. We needed 5 to 6 years of aggressive, long term and patient capital to make this dream a reality,” the co-founders said in their note.
They conceded that the mood of the market and the funding winter got better of the company.
“Koo could have easily scaled internationally and given India a global brand that was truly made in India. This dream will remain,” according to the note.
The co-founders further said that Koo will evaluate making its assets into a digital public good to enable social conversations in native languages, around the world.
“What we have built is truly magnificent. We will be happy to share some of these assets with someone with a great vision for India’s foray into social media,” the note read. PTI MBI MBI SHW
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