‘Little yellow bird bids final goodbye’: Koo to shut down

Homegrown micro-blogging platform, which secured over $60 million in funding, faced significant challenges in expanding user base and generating revenue over the past year

New Delhi: Homegrown micro-blogging platform Koo on Wednesday announced to discontinue its services to the public after partnership talks fell through.

“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” Koo founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka wrote in a LinkedIn post.

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“Most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company. A couple of them changed priority almost close to signing,” they added.

Koo, which secured more than $60 million in funding from prominent investors such as Tiger Global and Accel, faced significant challenges in expanding its user base and generating revenue over the past year.

In February, media firm Dailyhunt was in the advanced stages of talks to acquire Koo, TechCrunch reported.

Further in the post, the founders mentioned that “at our peak, we were about 2.1 million daily active users and around 10 million monthly active users, over 9000 VIPs, that included some of the most eminent personalities from various fields”.

“We were just months away from beating Twitter (now X) in India in 2022 and could have doubled down on that short-term goal with capital behind us,” they added.

The founders also mentioned that the mood of the market and the funding winter “got the better of us”. They signed off saying, “The little yellow bird says its final goodbye” in a reference to Koo’s yellow bird logo.