Koo is to shut down the four-year-old service after negotiations to buy it fell through

Koo — the Indian startup launched in 2020 as a competitor to Twitter (currently known as X) — is shutting down. The company, which was started four years ago by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, will cease operations after acquisition talks with “several major internet companies, conglomerates and media houses” fell through, according to the app’s founders. Koo was one of several companies that tried to create alternatives to American Internet services in India, catering to users in local languages.

Koo founders announce shutdown

In a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, Koo founders Radhakrishna and Bidawatka said Koo would be shuttered after takeover talks with “several major internet companies, conglomerates and media houses” fell through. A TechCrunch report in February claimed Koo was in talks to be acquired by Bangalore-based news and content aggregator Dailyhunt.

The founder also said that “several” companies that were in talks with the company “changed their priority almost close to signing” and “most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of the social media society.”

Koo had about 10 million monthly active users and 2.1 million daily active users at its peak. The app’s popularity soared — fueled by government approval and adoption — when Twitter and the Indian government clashed over requests to take down content. In 2022, Koo crossed the 50 million user mark and said it aims to overtake Twitter’s user base in India within a year.

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

According to Radhakrishna, the decision to shut down Koo was taken because the cost of running the social media app was too high. Koo released its algorithms publicly in 2022, and the founders now say they will also evaluate turning the service into a “digital public good that will enable social conversations in native languages, around the world.”