Co-founders of the social media app Koo, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, have announced plans to shut down the service, citing an inability to raise funds and unfavourable market sentiment. Launched in India in 2020, Koo expanded to Nigeria in 2021 following the Nigerian government's ban on Twitter (now X). At the time, Koo quickly became the preferred platform for the Nigerian government, which moved all its handles to the app. However, the enthusiasm for Koo did not last long as many Nigerians continued to use Twitter until the ban was lifted, prompting government social media managers to return to Twitter.
In a LinkedIn post, Radhakrishna and Bidawatka explained their decision to discontinue Koo: “Our partnership talks fell through and we will discontinue our service to the public. We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses but these talks didn't yield the outcome we wanted. 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. While we would've liked to keep the app running, the cost of technology services to keep a social media app running is high and we've had to take this tough decision.”
“Koo has been built with a lot of heart. We saw a big gap between the languages the world speaks and the fact that most social products, especially X/Twitter in India, are English-dominant. In a world where 80% of the population speaks a language other than English, this is a strong need. We wanted to democratize expression and enable a better way to connect people in their local languages,” They added.
The founders also shared that Koo was on the verge of surpassing Twitter in India in 2022 but lacked the necessary funding. “A prolonged funding winter which hit us at our peak hurt our plans at the time and we had to tone down on our growth trajectory. Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all the resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue. Koo used to have a 10% like ratio, almost 7-10x the ratio Twitter had – making Koo a more favourable platform for creators. At our peak, we were at about 2.1 million daily active users and ~10 million monthly active users, 9000+ VIPs, which included some of the most eminent personalities from various fields.”
They noted that they needed five to six years of aggressive, long-term, and patient capital to realize their dream for Koo, but the funding was not forthcoming.
Koo's struggle in Nigeria began in 2022 when government officials returned to Twitter after the ban was lifted. Former President Muhammadu Buhari and other officials who had created accounts on Koo in June 2021 stopped posting. For example, the last post on the verified official handle of the Nigerian Government (@nigeriagov), which has 73,500 followers, was on February 3rd, 2022.
Koo officially launched in Nigeria in August 2021, two months after the Twitter ban. The app positioned itself as a replacement for Twitter, mirroring the Bluebird app's design but with its yellow colour.
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