Koo On The Hunt For Strategic Partner As Funding Dries Up

Once considered India's answer to X (formerly Twitter), microblogging platform Koo is now on the lookout for a strategic partner as the "best way forward" for its growth.

"The next phase for Koo is to build scale, and that will happen with either funding or through a strategic partnership with someone who already has scale," Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, wrote on LinkedIn on Friday.

"With the current reality of a slow investor market, the best way forward is to partner with someone who has the distribution strength to give Koo massive user impetus and help it grow," Bidawatka said.

Bidawatka admitted that 2023 had been "one of the toughest years" for the startup ecosystem. "While our stable state plan was to scale more before generating revenue, Koo too was caught in this unfortunately sour market timing and had to switch gears from a growth trajectory to a revenue-generating engine."

Koo had to stop blitzscaling and "become more efficient" by curbing expenses and starting to generate revenue, he said.

"From growing rapidly to cutting down on growth and proving unit economics, within 6 months of revenue experimentation, we took a 180-degree turn and proved that this is a real business. While the market is unfavourable, we as founders are committed to our dream of taking Koo to the world and beating the best with Indian tech," he said.

Founded by Bidawatka and Aprameya Radhakrishna in March 2020, Koo became popular after several Union ministers and departments joined the platform in 2021 and 2022. The app positions itself as a vernacular-language-first platform and is available in 10 Indian languages as well as Italian, German, French, Thai, Vietnamese, Turkish, and Korean.

Koo is backed by investors including Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, and Accel.