Koo looking for strategic partner or funding, says co-founder Bidawatka

Bengaluru: Koo, the homegrown microblogging alternative to X (formerly Twitter), is seeking fresh funding or a strategic partnership to stay the course amid the tough funding winter. The company’s co-founder Mayank Bidawatka in a LinkedIn post on Friday said, “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. 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 a massive user impetus and help it grow.” He indicated the company is in talks with potential partners.Bidawatka wrote that earlier this year, the funding slowdown forced the company to focus on generating revenue. “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. With just 6 months more on our trajectory, we would have beaten Twitter in India. But we had to become more efficient by curbing expenses and start generating revenue,” he said. Media reports have said the site has seen a big drop in users.Bidawatka went on to note that it takes years to build a globally competitive microblog. “Even Threads, from the Godfather of social platforms (the reference is to Meta), is taking time to build basic features. Over the last few years, we have invested heavily in building a microblog to global standards with very sophisticated algorithms, processes, policies and engines. We are mighty lucky to have the most awesome team that we do.” Bidwatka said.Founded in 2020, Koo has been seen as the world’s second largest micro-blogging platform, offering microblogging options in 20 global languages. Koo has raised $65 million from investorsincluding Tiger Global and Accel Partners. It has over 60 million downloads and is used in over 100 countries. Bidawatka and Aprameya Radhakrishna, who had co-founded ride-hailing venture TaxiforSure that was acquired by Ola, started Koo with the idea of providing a microblogging site for those not comfortable with English, and those who wanted to reach out to non-English audiences. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, and started charging for services such as its blue tick that authenticates users, Radhakrishna and Bidawatka were adding new free features to Koo, including edit features, larger video uploads, and self-verification. Recently, Koo launched Koo Premium, providing creators the opportunity to monetise their contentand engage with them by sharing exclusive content with their subscribers.Bidwatka wrote in the LinkedIn post that they have now proven unit economics, and proven that Koo can be 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. We believe that India needs to have a seat at the table that’s currently only reserved for global tech giants,” he said.
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