Koo to Shut Down Four-Year-Old Service After Acquisition Discussions Fail

Koo — an Indian startup that was launched in 2020 as a competitor to Twitter (at the moment generally known as X) — is shutting down. The corporate, began by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka 4 years in the past will stop operations after acquisition talks with “a number of bigger web firms, conglomerates and media homes” failed, in keeping with the app’s founders. Koo was considered one of a number of firms which have tried to create options for US-based Web providers in India, catering to customers in native languages.

Koo founders announce shutdown

In a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, Koo founders Radhakrishna and Bidawatka stated that Koo can be shut down after acquisition discussions with “a number of bigger web firms, conglomerates, and media homes” didn’t materialise. A TechCrunch report in February claimed that Koo was in talks to be acquired by Bangalore-based information and content material aggregator Dailyhunt.

The founder additionally stated that “a pair” of the businesses that have been in talks with the corporate “modified precedence nearly near signing” and “most of them did not wish to cope with person generated content material and the wild nature of a social media firm.”

Koo had round 10 million month-to-month energetic customers and a couple of.1 million every day energetic customers at its peak. The app grew in reputation — boosted by an endorsement and adoption by the government — when Twitter and the federal government of India locked horns over content material takedown requests. In 2022, Koo crossed the 50 million person mark and stated it was aiming to overtake Twitter’s person base in India inside a yr.

One other issue that affected the corporate’s development was a chronic funding winter that has additionally affected a number of different startups all over the world. Radhakrishna states that Koo wanted 5 to 6 years of “aggressive, long run and affected person capital” to develop customers to a major scale earlier than producing income. 

In line with Radhakrishna, the choice to close Koo down was taken as the price of working the social media app was too excessive. Koo made its algorithms public in 2022, and the founders now say that they will even consider making the service into “a digital public good to allow social conversations in native languages, all over the world.”