Koo to Shut Down Four 4x5y20 Year-Old Service After Acquisition Discussions Fail

Koo had around 10 million monthly active s and 2.1 million daily active s at its peak, according to Co-Founder Aprameya Radhakrishna. 6f62g

Written by David Delima | Updated: 3 July 2024 14:12 IST

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

Photo Credit: Koo 1e394p

Koo added for ChatGPT to help s draft posts on the platform in 2023

Highlights

Koo was launched in March 2023 as a rival to Twitter (now known as X)
The microblogging service crossed the 50 million mark in 2022
Koo was impacted by a funding winter that also affected other startups

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Koo — an Indian startup that was launched in 2020 as a competitor to Twitter (currently known as X) — is shutting down. The company, started by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka four years ago will cease operations after acquisition talks with "multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses" failed, according to the app's founders. Koo was one of several companies that have attempted to create alternatives for US-based Internet services in India, catering to s in local languages.

Koo founders announce shutdown 5s5f1h

In a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, Koo founders Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said that Koo would be shut down after acquisition discussions with "multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses" failed to materialise. A TechCrunch report in February claimed that Koo was in talks to be acquired by Bangalore-based news and content aggregator Dailyhunt.

The founder also said that "a couple" of the companies that were in talks with the company "changed priority almost close to g" and “most of them didn't want to deal with generated content and the wild nature of a social media company.”

Koo Not Competing Against X, Meta's Threads by Meta: Company's Co-Founder

Koo had around 10 million monthly active s and 2.1 million daily active s at its peak. The app grew in popularity — boosted by an was aiming to overtake Twitter's base in India within a year.

Another factor that affected the company's growth was a prolonged funding winter that has also affected several other startups around the world. Radhakrishna states that Koo needed five to six years of "aggressive, long term and patient capital" to grow s to a significant scale before generating revenue.

According to Radhakrishna, the decision to shut Koo down was taken as the cost of running the social media app was too high. Koo made its algorithms public in 2022, and the founders now say that they will also evaluate making the service into "a digital public good to enable social conversations in native languages, around the world."

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David Delima

Email David Delima

As a writer on technology with Gadgets 360, David Delima is interested in open-source technology, cybersecurity, consumer privacy, and loves to read and write about how the Internet works. David can be ed via email at [email protected], on Twitter at @DxDavey, and Mastodon at mstdn.social/@delima. More