Indian social media platform Koo, positioned as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is shutting down after last-ditch acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed.
Despite securing more than $60 million in funding from prominent investors including Tiger Global and Accel, Koo has faced significant challenges in expanding its user base and generating revenue over the past two years.
TechCrunch exclusively reported in February that Koo was working with Dailyhunt, a $5 billion online media startup, for a possible sale. The talks did not lead to an agreement, Koo’s founders said on Wednesday.
“We explored partnerships with several larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses, but these talks did not yield the result we wanted,” Koo founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. He wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. “Most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company.”
Koo tried to win over users in India by giving them an X-like platform where they could express themselves in multiple local languages. Koo initially gained popularity in India during a period of tension between Twitter and the Indian government. The conflict arose when Twitter challenged the government’s opaque requests to remove content.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey claimed last year that the Indian government had threatened to shut down the social network in the country and raid the homes of its employees. (The Indian government disputed Dorsey’s claims, and a top minister at the time said Dorsey was trying to “get over this very dubious period in Twitter’s history.”)
Koo took advantage of the situation and positioned itself as a more compliant alternative, pledging to adhere to local regulations. This approach attracted many high-profile Indian politicians to the platform, though almost none from the opposition party. The startup had also expanded its eponymous app to Brazil.
But a protracted funding winter, which has forced startups worldwide to raise revenue and improve their finances, “got the better of us,” Koo’s founders said.
For years, Indian entrepreneurs and investors have been struggling to create homegrown alternatives to popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter and YouTube. It is becoming increasingly evident that these established American companies are demonstrating a superior ability to serve even the most diverse segments of the Indian market.
