The development comes when Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna has been camping overseas and is in talks with several investors for a fresh round of funding. The startup has raised $44.5 Mn till date and is backed by investors like Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Accel, and 3one4 Capital.
Micro-blogging platform Koo, the homegrown rival of Twitter, has laid off nearly 40 employees from its operations and backend team amid a funding crunch. The laid-off employees were mostly working in Delhi and other north Indian offices, sources said. The layoffs took place over the last month amidst a lot of people leaving the social media startup, the sources said.
Koo’s spokesperson said that the startup’s workforce has been streamlined to ensure it is aligned with the current business requirements. However, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup did not disclose the number of employees who were let go.
Koo Faces Funding Crunch-:
The development comes when Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna has been camping overseas and is in talks with several investors for a fresh round of funding. The startup has raised $44.5 Mn till date and is backed by investors like Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Accel, and 3one4 Capital.
Notably, Koo was one of the top advertisers on Meta (Facebook), as per a recent report by Hyderabad-based enterprise digital marketing agency Pyrite Technologies. Koo, as per the report, was second on the list of top advertisers on Meta, behind spiritual guru Sadhguru. It spent INR 8.67 Cr on advertising on the Meta platform during April 27-July 25 periods, more than the spending of the ruling BJP, and UNICEF, among others, as per the report.
In February, the microblogging platform last raised $10 Mn (INR 79 Cr) in two tranches from more than a dozen investors, including Capier Venture Partner, Ravi Modi Family Trust, and Ashneer Grover this year. Prior to that, Koo raised $30 Mn in a Series B round led by Tiger Global and various other investors in May 2021.
Koo, founded in March 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidwatka, shot to fame amidst an intense stand-off between the government and Twitter over social media intermediary guidelines. The startup was one of the first social media companies to come out in support of the Indian government’s new social media guidelines or IT Rules, which came into force last year.
Radhakrishna further said that monetization would happen once the startup captures the market. “That’s not a problem. There are enough ways that the US, as well as Chinese social media, have made money. So the important thing is to capture the market. That’s what we’re doing. That’s where we’re spending time,” Radhakrishna said.
