Four years after launch, Koo is shutting down​

Millions of social media users in India will be left stranded as microblogging platform Koo, which had branded itself as an alternative to X, announced it is shutting down four years after launch.

The platform’s founders, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced this on Wednesday and said a lack of funding along with high costs for technology had led to the decision.

Launched in 2020, Koo offered messaging in more than 10 Indian languages and gained prominence in 2021 after several ministers endorsed it amid a row between the Indian government and X.

The issue began after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government asked X to block a list of accounts it claimed were spreading fake news. The list included journalists, news organisations and opposition politicians.

X (then Twitter) announced that it had permanently blocked over 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Narendra Modi.

Twitter said it had acted after the government issued a notice of noncompliance, a move that experts said could put the company’s local employees in danger of spending up to seven years in custody.

In between this, supporters, cabinet ministers and officials from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) migrated to Koo overnight. Many of them shared hashtags calling for X to be banned in India. By the end of 2021, Koo had recorded 20 million downloads in the country.

But, the platform has struggled to get funding. On Wednesday, Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said Koo was “just months away” from beating X in India in 2022, but a “prolonged funder winter” had forced them to tone down their ambitions.

“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” they wrote on LinkedIn.

“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 have 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.

Koo’s founders in a statement

The founders added: “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. Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all the resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue. 

“Koo used to have a 10% like ratio, almost 7-1Ox the ratio Twitter had – making Koo a more favourable platform for creators. At our peak, we were at about 2.1 million daily active users and ~10 million monthly active users, 9000+ VIPs, which included some of the most eminent personalities from various fields.” 

Koo’s downfall did not start now

In April 2023, when the company had acquired a 60-million user base, it had also fired almost a third of its employees.

The company dismissed 30% of its about 260 workers as the “global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work toward proving unit economics,” a spokesperson for the company, backed by Tiger Global, said in a reply to queries by Bloomberg News.

Koo, with more than 60 million downloads, is “well capitalised,” and the company is striving to become profitable with monetisation experiments, Bidawatka said in an interview. It also has one of the highest revenue per user among other social media companies currently, he added.

The latest statement ended on a note that the founders will get back into the social media space “one way or another”.

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Millions of social media users in India will be left stranded as microblogging platform Koo, which had branded itself as an alternative to X, announced it is shutting down four years after launch.

The platform’s founders, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced this on Wednesday and said a lack of funding along with high costs for technology had led to the decision.

Launched in 2020, Koo offered messaging in more than 10 Indian languages and gained prominence in 2021 after several ministers endorsed it amid a row between the Indian government and X.

The issue began after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government asked X to block a list of accounts it claimed were spreading fake news. The list included journalists, news organisations and opposition politicians.

X (then Twitter) announced that it had permanently blocked over 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Narendra Modi.

Twitter said it had acted after the government issued a notice of noncompliance, a move that experts said could put the company’s local employees in danger of spending up to seven years in custody.

In between this, supporters, cabinet ministers and officials from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) migrated to Koo overnight. Many of them shared hashtags calling for X to be banned in India. By the end of 2021, Koo had recorded 20 million downloads in the country.

But, the platform has struggled to get funding. On Wednesday, Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said Koo was “just months away” from beating X in India in 2022, but a “prolonged funder winter” had forced them to tone down their ambitions.

“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” they wrote on LinkedIn.

“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 have 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.

Koo’s founders in a statement

The founders added: “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. Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all the resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue. 

“Koo used to have a 10% like ratio, almost 7-1Ox the ratio Twitter had – making Koo a more favourable platform for creators. At our peak, we were at about 2.1 million daily active users and ~10 million monthly active users, 9000+ VIPs, which included some of the most eminent personalities from various fields.” 

Koo’s downfall did not start now

In April 2023, when the company had acquired a 60-million user base, it had also fired almost a third of its employees.

The company dismissed 30% of its about 260 workers as the “global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work toward proving unit economics,” a spokesperson for the company, backed by Tiger Global, said in a reply to queries by Bloomberg News.

Koo, with more than 60 million downloads, is “well capitalised,” and the company is striving to become profitable with monetisation experiments, Bidawatka said in an interview. It also has one of the highest revenue per user among other social media companies currently, he added.

The latest statement ended on a note that the founders will get back into the social media space “one way or another”.

 Millions of social media users in India will be left stranded as microblogging platform Koo, which had branded…  

Millions of social media users in India will be left stranded as microblogging platform Koo, which had branded itself as an alternative to X, announced it is shutting down four years after launch.

The platform’s founders, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced this on Wednesday and said a lack of funding along with high costs for technology had led to the decision.

Launched in 2020, Koo offered messaging in more than 10 Indian languages and gained prominence in 2021 after several ministers endorsed it amid a row between the Indian government and X.

The issue began after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government asked X to block a list of accounts it claimed were spreading fake news. The list included journalists, news organisations and opposition politicians.

X (then Twitter) announced that it had permanently blocked over 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Narendra Modi.

Twitter said it had acted after the government issued a notice of noncompliance, a move that experts said could put the company’s local employees in danger of spending up to seven years in custody.

In between this, supporters, cabinet ministers and officials from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) migrated to Koo overnight. Many of them shared hashtags calling for X to be banned in India. By the end of 2021, Koo had recorded 20 million downloads in the country.

But, the platform has struggled to get funding. On Wednesday, Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said Koo was “just months away” from beating X in India in 2022, but a “prolonged funder winter” had forced them to tone down their ambitions.

“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” they wrote on LinkedIn.

“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 have 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.

The founders added: “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. Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all the resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue. 

“Koo used to have a 10% like ratio, almost 7-1Ox the ratio Twitter had – making Koo a more favourable platform for creators. At our peak, we were at about 2.1 million daily active users and ~10 million monthly active users, 9000+ VIPs, which included some of the most eminent personalities from various fields.” 

Koo’s downfall did not start now

In April 2023, when the company had acquired a 60-million user base, it had also fired almost a third of its employees.

The company dismissed 30% of its about 260 workers as the “global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work toward proving unit economics,” a spokesperson for the company, backed by Tiger Global, said in a reply to queries by Bloomberg News.

Koo, with more than 60 million downloads, is “well capitalised,” and the company is striving to become profitable with monetisation experiments, Bidawatka said in an interview. It also has one of the highest revenue per user among other social media companies currently, he added.

The latest statement ended on a note that the founders will get back into the social media space “one way or another”.