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 corporations, conglomerates and media homes” failed, based on the app’s founders. Koo was one in all a number of corporations which have tried to create alternate 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 mentioned that Koo could be shut down after acquisition discussions with “a number of bigger web corporations, conglomerates, and media homes” did not 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 mentioned that “a pair” of the businesses that had been in talks with the corporate “modified precedence virtually near signing” and “most of them did not wish to take care of 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 day by day energetic customers at its peak. The app grew in recognition — 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 mentioned it was aiming to overtake Twitter’s person base in India inside a 12 months.

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

In accordance 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 may even consider making the service into “a digital public good to allow social conversations in native languages, world wide.”