Koo, a million-dollar Indian startup that was once considered a rival of Twitter (now X), is shutting down. Its founder, Aprameya Radhakrishna, posted the news on LinkedIn on Wednesday. The news came after the ongoing merger deals with different companies fell through.
Koo’s founder RadhaKrishna, 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.”
As per the founders, having better tech is not enough to grow a social media platform. It requires high capital investments to build top-of-the-line products, be they in space, AI, Robotics, Social media, or other industries. He further mentioned that a lot more capital is required to become a global player in an industry segment that already has companies like Twitter.
Also read, India’s Koo Entered Brazil Market, Becomes Top App
About Koo
Koo was a social media startup with an interface like Twitter that supported multiple languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Assamese, and more. In the last round of funding, the company was valued at $274 million and secured a massive funding of $66 million from investors like 3one4 Capital. Koo was also backed by some of the major investment funds like Accel and Tiger Global. However, since last year, the company has been struggling to acquire more funds after it started exploring options for mergers.
How did this happen?
Despite receiving such a high amount of investments, the company’s lacklustre financial performance and decreasing user base caused losses to surge by 460% on a year-on-year basis and reach Rs 197 crore, resulting in Koo’s demise. The company lacked a strong financial model and spent heavily on user acquisition. Moreover, the number of active users of the platform fell from 7.2 million in June 2023 to 2.7 million in March.
