Indian social microblogging platform Koo is officially shutting down. The company’s co-founder Mayank Bidawatka has shared a “final update” about the app. Bidawatka announced in a LinkedIn post: “We will be shutting down our service to the public”. This update from the co-founder came just hours after a report by The Morning Context on Wednesday, which revealed that after acquisition talks between Koo and Dailyhunt failed, the Indian microblogging platform would be shutting down. Bidawatka’s post on LinkedIn confirms this. “We explored multiple partnerships with several large internet companies, groups and media houses, but these talks did not yield the result we wanted,” he wrote in the post. Bidawatka added, “Although we wanted to keep the app running, the cost of technology services to keep the social media app running is high and we had to take this difficult decision.”

Indian microblogging platform Koo was launched in March 2020 by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. It gained recognition by winning the Aatmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge organized by the Government of India in August 2020. The app was considered India’s answer to Twitter amid growing demand for Made in India products and services in the country. By April 2023, Koo began reducing its workforce to manage expenses. Over the course of a year, it reduced its 260-member team by 30 percent, and laid off about 80 employees.

One specific feature that Koo aimed to offer its users was the ability to use the platform in local languages, specifically languages ​​spoken in India. “We saw a huge gap between the languages ​​spoken in the world and the fact that most social products, especially X/Twitter in India are dominated by English. In a world where 80 percent of the population speaks a language other than English, this is a strong need. We wanted to democratize expression and enable a better way for people to connect in their local languages.
“Most of the global products are dominated by the Americans. We believe India should also have a place in this sector,” says Mayank Bidawatka.

The co-founder says the company was set to become India’s Twitter had the lack of funding not forced it to back out. “We built a globally scalable product in a much shorter period of time than X/Twitter, with better systems, algorithms and a strong stakeholder-first philosophy,” he said in a LinkedIn post. Koo had a 10 percent like ratio, which is about 7-10 times higher than Twitter’s ratio – making Koo a more favorable platform for creators. At our peak we had around 2.1 million daily active users and ~10 million monthly active users, 9000+ VIPs, including some of the most iconic celebrities from various fields. We were just a few months away from overtaking Twitter in India in 2022 and could have doubled that short-term goal had we had the capital,” he said.

However, the company is still looking for a good deal. Bidawatka says the company would be “happy to share some of these assets with someone with a great vision to enter India’s social media”. He further added, “We will also evaluate making it a digital public good to enable social conversations in local languages ​​across the world. This is a very difficult and complex technology and we have built it with hard work in record time.”

Still, the company’s founders have promised to return. Bidawataka ended the last update for Koo by saying, “You’ll see us back in the arena in some form or another”.