Koo To Shut Shop As Acquisition, Funding Talks Fail

Homegrown social media platform, Koo, will be shutting down, as the company's conversations with potential investors and acquirers broke down.

"Our partnership talks fell through and we will be discontinuing our service to the public. We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses, but these talks didn't yield the outcome we wanted," Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, wrote in a social media post on July 3.

Koo was in deep financial trouble, with revenues not scaling up as per its operations. In September last year, Bidawatka had said that the next phase for the X rival was to build scale, but with a slow investor market, the best way forward would be to partner with someone.

"Unfortunately for us, the mood of the market and the funding winter got the better of us...Koo could have easily scaled internationally and given India a global brand that was truly made in India. This dream will remain," Bidawatka said.

TechCrunch had reported that Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation Pvt., the parent company of short video app Josh and news app Dailyhunt, were in final stages to acquire Koo.

At its peak, Koo had reached about 21 lakh daily active users and 1 crore monthly active users, with popular faces, especially from Modi government 2.0, joining the platform. "We were just months away from beating Twitter in India in 2022 and could have doubled down on that short term goal with capital behind us," Bidawatka said. "We needed five to six years of aggressive, long term and patient capital to make this dream a reality."

Koo raised about $60 million in funding over its lifetime as well, attracting investors like Tiger Global, Accel, Kalaari Capital and 3one4 Capital.