Koo hailed as India’s answer to Twitter, soared to fame with promises of multilingual social media for millions. Founded in 2020, it quickly gained government support and celebrity endorsements, even expanding to other countries. However, despite early success and significant investments, Koo faced rapid decline. Within just a few years, the company struggled to raise funds, leading to layoffs and internal turmoil. Issues with user engagement, a perception of political bias, and challenges in monetization further compounded its woes. Now, amidst talks of acquisition and a dwindling user base, Koo fights to stay afloat, questioning its future in the competitive social media landscape.

As reported by Rest of World, when Mukul joined Indian microblogging company Koo in early 2023, he was excited to work with the roughly 300-person team developing India’s answer to Twitter (formerly X). He was hired to work on several components of the app, including redesigning parts of the homepage. Mukul thought that his career would flourish alongside the company’s expansion.

Only a month after he started, the corporation began laying off employees. By April, Koo had informed local media that it had cut off 30% of its employees. Mukul was not spared: he was asked to leave in June, only six months after joining the company.

“Three layoffs took place in the span of five months,” Mukul told Rest of World, asking for anonymity because he is not permitted to speak to the media. “They should have been clear [while hiring me] that such a situation may happen because as a company, you know where it’s going.”

Koo, founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, was India’s first microblogging service to be available in over ten languages. The software, which featured a yellow bird as its logo, was billed as a potentially strong competitor to X. Koo has received approximately 60 million downloads since its introduction. The startup drew investor interest and enticed major Indian politicians and Hollywood personalities to use the app. It also expanded to at least two other countries within a short period.

“We wanted to build a social media platform for Indians, by Indians.”

However, four years after its launch, Koo is in a hard place. The company has been unable to raise additional funding and has reduced its employment to one-fifth. The founders covered the March salary out of their own pockets. Koo is apparently in talks to be acquired.

Most staff reported that Koo struggled to prosper in an increasingly tough financial climate. Experts, meanwhile, emphasized that having multilingual material as the primary “value add” was insufficient for an Indian-language social media firm to prosper.

“For any social media platform to succeed, it needs some kind of differentiator — either in terms of the content or the media ecology, which at this point Koo does not have,” Joyojeet Pal, a social media researcher from the University of Michigan, told Rest of World. “If Koo had played a leadership role in voice- or video-based communication, or group-based communication, it may also have had a niche appeal, which sadly it does not.”

In early 2020, Koo was only a prototype. Founders Radhakrishna and Bidawatka were also running Vokal, an Indian-language voice-based counterpart of Quora. This was also when the Narendra Modi government, which had blocked hundreds of Chinese apps, was urging Indian companies to develop indigenous alternatives.

The Koo team was in the appropriate location and time.

Sagar joined Koo that year, unaware that he would become a key member in the development of an Indian X. “We wanted to build a social media platform for Indians, by Indians,” he told Rest of World, asking to be cited anonymously because he is not permitted to speak to the media. “For instance, if there is a police officer in Darbhanga in Bihar who posts something about a potential curfew or any issue, the probability of people around that area reading that post on Twitter is very low.” That is where Koo would come in, establishing hyperlocal communities.

According to three former employees, the corporation had teams dedicated to working with minor language groups and interest-based groups such as local poets, media figures, and astrologers. “There were language-specific community managers, too, who focused specifically on promoting the users of that specific language,” said a former Koo engineer, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not permitted to speak to the media about his employer.

“For any social media platform to succeed, it needs some kind of differentiator.”

According to three former employees, the first of many highs for Koo occurred in August 2020, when it placed second in the Indian government’s AatmaNirbhar Bharat App (“self-sufficient India app”) innovation contest.

Only five months later, Koo had another reason to celebrate: the company had collaborated with Republic Bharat, a renowned Hindi news channel. Republic Bharat would use Koo to conduct surveys for Hindi-language speakers and broadcast the results on the channel. This attracted new users to Koo. “The traffic was crazy; we got some 3 million users in three days,” Sagar said. In a 2021 interview, Bidawatka stated that Koo has grown to 4.7 million subscribers within a year of its inception.

The confrontation between India’s ruling party and X, however, provided the platform with the most traction. The latter was caught in a difficult situation in early 2021 when it refused to give in to the government’s orders to erase certain posts and accounts that were critical of the Modi government.

X also described a post by a representative for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party as “manipulated media.” Soon later, authorities attempted to raid X’s office in the capital city of New Delhi.

In February 2021, in the thick of the impasse, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal joined Koo, along with other ministers and celebrities. “Koo had immense government support,” said Kumar Saurav, founder of influencer marketing agency Savin Communication. “Politicians had promoted Koo a lot as ‘India’s Twitter.'” Saurav added that more than 5,000 influencers from his agency joined Koo between 2020 and 2021.

In June 2021, the Nigerian government stopped X two days after it erased a message by President Muhammadu Buhari. Koo swooped in and positioned itself as an alternative. Buhari started an account on Koo that month, and many other Nigerian government leaders followed suit.

The next year, Koo launched in Brazil, claiming to have received one million downloads in 48 hours. At the time, co-founder Bidawatka wrote a blog post called “Koo Brazil.” In the post, he discussed how “a true alternative to Twitter,” which supported numerous languages, was a global need. “We found that native language content was significantly underrepresented. “We saw a gap that could be filled around the world,” Bidawatka wrote.

Koo’s success in India continued unabated.

In February 2021, when X momentarily blocked the account of Kangana Ranaut, a prominent Bollywood actor and recently elected Member of Parliament, for provocative tweets about farmers’ demonstrations in India, she threatened to leave the platform and go to Koo. “Your time is over @Twitter, it’s time to go to #kooapp; I’ll notify everyone shortly about my account information there. “Absolutely thrilled to experience homegrown #kooapp,” she wrote. Ranaut joined Koo, after which X permanently suspended her account.

The night Ranaut signed up for Koo, Sagar was awakened by a 4 a.m. call from his supervisor, who informed him that the actor had joined the platform and that the app was not working.

“This used to happen a lot. Things used to stop working because the scale was crazy and we were at maximum capacity,” he said . During Sagar’s years working with Koo, the platform was overwhelmed about 10-12 times, including when other Bollywood celebs like Anupam Kher and Karan Johar joined, he added. Another former employee said that whenever anti-X feelings rose up, Koo’s user base experienced a significant increase.

Meanwhile, Koo was attempting to persuade Modi to join the platform and prepping its infrastructure in case he did, according to three former staffers. The instruction was to “just get Modiji and Amit Shah [on Koo],” Sagar stated. “Their goal was to bring Modi onto the platform so that the user base would grow,” said a former staffer who dealt with local language communities and requested anonymity since he is not permitted to speak to the media.

With all the attention, Koo became an investor favorite. In February 2021, the company raised $4.1 million in its Series A round, and just three months later, it raised a further $31 million lead by American investment firm Tiger Global, valuing Koo at $100 million. According to Tracxn, by June 2022, Koo had raised more than $57 million and attained a peak valuation of $285.5 million.

The inflow of funds enabled the company to develop from a few people to around 300. It intended to grow its personnel to 500 by 2022. “We were in a hypergrowth phase and never looked back,” a Koo employee who has worked for the company since its inception told Rest of World. He requested anonymity because he is not permitted to speak to the media.

Millions of consumers downloaded Koo, and by July 2022, the app had more than 9 million monthly active users, according to news sources. And the corporation was investing to attract users: According to a research by local tech media portal Entrackr, Koo spent about $16.5 million on advertising and promotions in fiscal year 2022, when company income exceeded $650,000.

The first signals of problems at Koo emerged around the end of 2022: the global startup funding environment had slowed, forcing several Indian businesses to shut down or reduce their personnel. In September of that year, Koo laid off 5% of its employees.

According to two former workers and local news reports, Koo’s founders hoped to raise more money, but financiers advised them to shift gears and focus on platform monetization rather than development and marketing.

“One of the biggest questions for any Indian content player is how much money can they make from a non-metro, non-English-speaking user, how much ARPU [average revenue per user] can they make?” said Anurag Ramdasan, a partner at early-stage VC firm 3one4 Capital. “It’s just a very tough business.”

According to two employees, Koo refactored portion of its code to include monetization features such as Koo Coins, a loyalty program that rewards users for spending more time on the network. “We also did advertisements, launching campaigns for major businesses. But in order to keep doing that, we had to keep promoting to attract consumers in,” said a former Koo employee, who requested anonymity because he is not permitted to communicate with the media. To improve income, Koo finally introduced a “premium” function that allows authors to provide unique material to their customers.

Today, Koo faces a number of hurdles, beginning with engagement. The company’s active user base fell from 7.2 million to 2.7 million between June 2023 and February 2024, according to Inc42.

“Koo was not able to capitalize on and retain the anti-Twitter sentiment that helped it rise,” said Saurav from Savin Communication. “The engagement and reach on Koo was not as high as other platforms.” He claims there are currently only 100 influencers from his agency on Koo, and they, too, are not particularly active.

According to two former Koo employees, new users did not engage with the content. “I think the problem was that even though we had onboarded the tier-2 audience onto our platform, they were not as engaged,” the previous engineer told me. “They couldn’t create virality.”

Another difficulty, according to a former staffer who dealt with local language communities, was Koo’s lack of focus. “The goalpost kept changing … “They wanted to copy Twitter at one point and Instagram at another,” he explained. “If they had focused on one aspect, it would have been a very nice app.” Sagar, on the other hand, referred to this as “startup culture,” in which they would have to “quickly try one thing and then another” based on the results of their trials and investor feedback.

The platform has also failed to delete hateful content. Global Witness and the Internet Freedom Foundation investigated Koo for misogynistic hate speech. According to their February report, Koo removed only six of 23 hate speech-related posts and did not take any action against the others.

According to experts, Koo was unable to dissociate itself from being labeled a “right-leaning” platform because its early users were prominent ruling party politicians. “After early attempts to appeal to right-wing audiences in India, it was unable to shake the perception of being dominated by right-wing voices and narratives, which potentially limited major avenues for growth,” said Prateek Waghre, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.

In a LinkedIn article, Bidawatka dubbed 2023 “one of the toughest years for the startup ecosystem around the world,” as news of Koo’s demise began to circulate around September 2023.

He stated that the company was now looking for a larger entity to collaborate with to help the platform grow. “We still believe that a microblog built for the native language speakers is the most inclusive way to take microblogging to the larger world,” according to him. “80% of the world speaks a native language, other than English, and they too deserve a language first platform to express themselves and connect better.”

Bidawatka wrote again earlier this year, stating that the collaboration talks were “still on,” and that employees would be paid after the arrangement was completed. “Koo remains operational. It’s very well built and a fully automated product that needs little manual intervention to function,” he wrote.

Last year, GreatGameIndia reported that as a consequence of Facebook’s alleged lack of cooperation with the state police in an investigation involving an imprisoned Indian citizen in Saudi Arabia, the Indian state of Karnataka has threatened to shut down Facebook’s operations.