X-rival Koo announces closure after takeover talks fail

Koo — an Indian startup that launched in 2020 as a competitor to Twitter (currently known as X) — is closing down. The company, founded four years ago by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, will cease operations after acquisition talks with “several larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses” fell through, the app’s founders said. Koo was one of several companies that have attempted to create alternatives to US-based internet services in India by serving users in local languages.

Koo founders announce closure

In a LinkedIn after On Wednesday, Koo founders Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said Koo would be shuttered after acquisition talks with “several larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses” failed to materialize, a TechCrunch report claimed in February that Koo was in talks to be acquired by Bangalore-based news and content aggregator Dailyhunt.

The founder also said that “a few” of the companies in talks with the company “changed their priorities almost at the point of signing” and that “most of them didn’t want to have anything to do with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company.”

At its peak, Koo had about 10 million monthly active users and 2.1 million daily active users. The app grew in popularity — fueled by government endorsement and adoption — as Twitter and the Indian government clashed over requests to take down content. In 2022, Koo surpassed 50 million users and said it aimed to overtake Twitter’s user base in India within a year.

Another factor that influenced the company’s growth was a prolonged funding winter that has also affected several other startups around the world. Radhakrishna states that Koo needed five to six years of “aggressive, long-term, patient capital” to grow users to a significant scale before generating revenue.

According to Radhakrishna, the decision to close Koo was made because the costs of running the social media app were too high. Koo made its algorithms public in 2022, and the founders now say they will also evaluate whether they can turn the service into “a digital public good to enable social conversations in native languages, across the world.”