India’s Social Media Platform Koo Says It Is Shutting Down: Know More

Koo, which was seen as India’s local alternative to Twitter (now X), is shutting down. The news was first reported earlier on Wednesday and now confirmed by the company’s co-founders via post on LinkedIn. Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder, Koo has talked about the company’s decision to wind up after their talks for partnership fell through.

He mentions that Koo was in talks with multiple larger internet companies and even media houses. He even cited that one of its talks fell through at the last moment because of changed priorities. Speaking to News18 Tech earlier, Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder, Koo had referred to Koo as a global player and a platform that wanted to localise social media needs according to the norm of each country.

The platform’s growing ambition needed funds and Bidawatka claims that the funding winter hurt its plans to grow. He even talks about the difficulty in building a social media platform and the need for such companies to get long term and patient capital to grow rather than start focusing on profits and revenues from year two of their origin.

The Koo co-founders claim they have built a globally scalable product in a fraction of the time that X did and even cites figures to validate those claims. “Once we crack the Indian market, any other country with multiple languages would love to have the same solution as Koo. So, that is our plan,” Radhakrishna had mentioned to us in 2022.

But the overall picture of the platform and the last few months at the company, which involved salary cuts and outstanding payments, were heavily reliant on these supposed partnerships coming through.

He concludes the post by suggesting measures that are needed for world-beating products from India and their evident support for a lot more capital where the competition with global players is fierce and capital intensive to keep the business running.

Koo’s trajectory over the last four years since its debut shows the value of these companies and how they need big behemoths to support their running, systems and technology costs that are never going to come cheap or be easily available.