Startup Deep Dive : Koo — it crossed 60 million downloads and still shut down in under five years

Koo crossed 60 million downloads, signed up government ministers within its first year, and still shut down on 3 July 2024 with barely five months’ warning. The company that briefly looked like India’s answer to Twitter could not turn a crowd of installs into a business that paid its own bills.

Founded in Bengaluru in November 2019 by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo built an Indian-language microblogging app, rode a political dispute between Twitter and the Indian government to its biggest growth spurt, raised tens of millions of dollars from marquee investors, and then spent 2023 and 2024 hunting for a buyer that never signed on the dotted line. This is the rise and the shutdown, with the numbers on both sides.

Quick facts

What they do

Koo sold itself as a home-grown, multilingual short-post platform for Indians who wanted to write, argue and follow public figures in their own language rather than English. Its pitch was simple: a Twitter-shaped app, built in Bengaluru, that supported Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and Punjabi alongside English, and that specifically chased users outside India’s big metros. By October 2022 the company said more than 60 percent of its users came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, and that it reached roughly 4,800 towns and cities across the country (Business Today, October 2022). Its customers, in effect, were retail users who consumed the app for free; the intended paying customers, never fully realised, were advertisers and brands who wanted access to that audience.

The origin

Aprameya Radhakrishna was not a first-time founder when he started Koo. He had earlier co-founded the cab-aggregator TaxiForSure, which Ola acquired for about $200 million in 2015 (Business Today, October 2022). That exit gave him capital and credibility to try again, and in November 2019 he teamed up with Mayank Bidawatka to register Bombinate Technologies, the company behind Koo, in Bengaluru. The app itself launched in early 2020, betting that the next wave of Indian internet users would rather post in their mother tongue than in English, and that a homegrown app could win their attention before an American incumbent did. Barely eight months after launch, the bet earned an early, if modest, official nod: in August 2020, Koo placed second in the Indian government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in the social category, a competition designed to promote domestically built apps. It was a small prize by funding standards, but it put Koo in front of policymakers months before the moment that would actually make the app a household name.

The struggle years

Koo’s four and a half years were rarely comfortable. Growth was real but thin: Wikipedia’s compilation of contemporaneous press puts cumulative installs from Indian app stores at only 2.6 million through the whole of 2020, a modest base for an app trying to out-flank Twitter. By September 2023, the strain had turned existential. Co-founder Mayank Bidawatka told TechCrunch that monthly active users had fallen below one million, that the company had spent at least three straight quarters trying and failing to close a new funding round, and that it had roughly six months of runway left. Koo was, by its own admission, now looking for a “strategic partner” rather than a fresh venture round. Layoffs had already started chipping away at the headcount: Business Today reported a round cutting about 5 percent of staff in August 2022, when the company still had around 300 employees, and by its own later account workforce reductions turned “significant” from April 2023 onward as the search for a buyer dragged on. Bidawatka’s own words captured the frustration of a company that felt it was close but never quite there: “with just six months more on our trajectory, we would have beaten Twitter in India,” he told TechCrunch in September 2023 — a claim that, however sincerely meant, the company was never able to test, because the six months it needed kept slipping away.

The turning point

The single event that took Koo from a niche app to a national talking point happened over just five days. Between 6 and 11 February 2021, installs of Koo “increased rapidly,” according to contemporaneous reporting compiled on Wikipedia, as Twitter clashed publicly with the Indian government over its refusal, and later partial compliance, in blocking accounts linked to the 2020–2021 farmers’ protest under India’s new IT Rules. As the government pressed Twitter to act and threatened consequences under domestic law, several Indian ministers, including the then-commerce minister Piyush Goyal, opened accounts on Koo and encouraged citizens to follow them there. An app that had managed only 2.6 million installs in the whole of 2020 was, within roughly fourteen months of that single week, reporting more than 30 million downloads (TechCrunch, April 2022), and within twenty months, more than 45 million (Business Today, October 2022). The government dispute did not build Koo’s product; it built its audience, almost overnight, and everything that followed — the funding rounds, the international expansion, the eventual funding crunch — happened in the shadow of that one week.

The money behind it

Koo’s funding shape closely tracked its growth story: quiet early rounds, a large step-up right after the February 2021 surge, and then a slow tightening as investor appetite for social apps cooled.

• Series B, May 2021: $30 million, led by Tiger Global Management, with Accel, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, 3one4 Capital, IIFL and Mirae Asset also named as participants — the round that followed directly from the February 2021 growth spike.
• Extension round, November 2022: a further $6 million led by Accel and Tiger Global, reported by VCCircle and cited in contemporaneous coverage, pushing Koo’s reported valuation past $275 million.
• Cumulative funding: $64.1 million raised “in just over two years” as of October 2022, per Business Today’s reporting citing Tracxn data; TechCrunch’s later reporting in February 2024, at the time of the Dailyhunt talks, put lifetime funding at “over $60 million” — broadly consistent with the earlier figure.
• Valuation: about $263 million as of June 2022 per Tracxn data cited by Business Today, rising to a reported “over $275 million” after the November 2022 extension.
• Key backers and what each brought: Tiger Global anchored the Series B and the 2022 extension, giving Koo late-stage credibility; Accel co-led the final round and stayed involved through the 2023 search for a partner; Mirae Asset and 3one4 Capital were repeat names across rounds, signalling continued, if shrinking, investor conviction even as growth slowed.

What the money could not buy, in the end, was a second growth catalyst as powerful as the first one. Every subsequent milestone — Brazil, self-verification, creator tools — was an attempt to manufacture organically what the Twitter dispute had handed Koo for free in February 2021.

How it makes money

Koo never fully replaced its free, virality-driven user base with a durable revenue model. Its own executives admitted the model was still being built years after launch.

• Advertising: the core intended revenue line, selling access to an audience skewed toward Tier 2 and Tier 3 India and non-English speakers — a demographic advertisers found harder to reach through English-first platforms.
• Verification and creator tools: in April 2022, Koo rolled out a free, Aadhaar-based self-verification feature letting any user get a green “verified” tick in under 30 seconds through a third-party identity check, aimed at building trust and reducing anonymous trolling and bot activity rather than charging users directly (TechCrunch, April 2022).
• Disclosed revenue: $145,000 for the year ended 31 December 2020 — the only top-line figure the company appears to have made public, per Business Today’s October 2022 reporting on regulatory filings.
• Revenue “reset”: co-founder Mayank Bidawatka told TechCrunch in February 2024 that the company took “a 180 degree turn” within six months of active revenue experimentation, moving from prioritising growth to trying to prove unit economics — an acknowledgement that spending on scale had outrun the ability to monetise it.
• The part people got wrong: Koo’s download and user counts were frequently read as proof of a Twitter-scale business. In reality, TechCrunch reported monthly active users below one million by September 2023, a fraction of the tens of millions of cumulative downloads the company had publicised — a gap between installs and engaged, monetisable users that no disclosed revenue figure ever closed.

The numbers

Koo was a private company and did not publish routine annual results the way a listed business would. The only figures that surfaced in press reporting, drawn from regulatory filings, cover the year Koo launched and the year after; no later-year revenue or loss figures for FY22 or FY23 could be verified from public reporting before the company shut down, and that gap is reflected honestly below rather than filled with an estimate.

Source for the two disclosed lines: Business Today, October 2022, citing the company’s regulatory filings. The scale of the FY21 loss against a revenue line still measured in the low lakhs shows how far Koo’s spending on growth and headcount had outrun any income by its second full year — a gap the company was still trying to close when it hunted for a “strategic partner” in 2023.

Where the money comes from

Koo’s growth was lopsided by geography and by user type from the start, and that concentration mattered more once the company needed to convert scale into revenue or into a buyer.

• Domestic base: over 60 percent of users came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns and cities, and the app reached roughly 4,800 towns and cities across India by October 2022 (Business Today).
• Language spread: nine Indian languages plus English, positioned deliberately away from the English-first, metro-heavy user base of global platforms (TechCrunch, April 2022; Business Today, October 2022).
• International expansion, Brazil: Koo launched in Brazil in November 2022 and added more than 1 million downloads in its first week there, verified independently by Sensor Tower at roughly 973,000 installs across the App Store and Google Play in that window (TechCrunch, November 2022).
• The surprise — moderation, not monetisation, was the immediate cost of scale: within days of the Brazil launch, Koo had removed roughly 3,000 pieces of flagged content and blocked users who engaged with it, after high-profile accounts such as Brazilian influencer Felipe Neto (who amassed over 500,000 Koo followers) drew a wave of hostile posts (TechCrunch, November 2022). Growth abroad brought moderation bills before it brought advertising revenue.
• “Eminent” accounts: Koo counted about 7,500 verified, high-profile accounts — politicians, celebrities and officials — by October 2022, the layer of users it leaned on most heavily for credibility and virality (Business Today).

The risks

• Borrowed, not built, growth: Koo’s single biggest growth event was a political dispute between Twitter and the Indian government in February 2021, not a product breakthrough. When that tailwind faded, the company could not reproduce it — monthly active users had fallen below one million by September 2023 even as cumulative downloads stayed in the tens of millions (TechCrunch, September 2023).
• Capital intensity of social platforms: ThePrint’s July 2024 reporting on the shutdown quoted the founders’ own assessment that a platform like Koo needed five to six years of “patient capital” to reach profitability — a runway that dried up as the broader funding winter took hold and multiple potential partners “changed priority almost close to signing,” in the founders’ words.
• Content moderation exposure: operating a user-generated content platform under India’s IT Rules, and separately in Brazil, meant real, recurring costs and legal exposure — illustrated by the roughly 3,000 posts Koo had to remove within days of its Brazil launch alone (TechCrunch, November 2022). ThePrint reported that this same moderation burden was one reason larger potential acquirers ultimately balked at a deal.

The takeaway

Koo’s arc is a reminder that a viral spike is an opportunity, not a business model. A five-day political dispute handed the company an audience that took most incumbents years to build, and Koo spent the next three years trying to convert that borrowed attention into a revenue line, a defensible product habit, or a buyer willing to pay for what remained. It never fully managed any of the three. The company’s own founders put it plainly when they shut the app down: they needed years of patient capital to prove out a model that advertisers, and eventually acquirers, kept declining to bet on. For any founder riding a sudden, externally caused surge, Koo’s story is the specific lesson: the clock to build a monetisable product starts the moment the spike arrives, not once it has already faded.

Frequently asked questions

When did Koo shut down?

Koo ceased operations on 3 July 2024, according to Business Today and ThePrint’s reporting on the founders’ announcement.

Who founded Koo and when?

Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka founded Koo, operated by Bombinate Technologies, on 14 November 2019 in Bengaluru; the app launched in early 2020.

How much funding did Koo raise in total?

Business Today reported $64.1 million raised as of October 2022, citing Tracxn data; TechCrunch’s February 2024 reporting, around the time of the Dailyhunt acquisition talks, put lifetime funding at “over $60 million,” broadly consistent with the earlier figure.

Why did Koo grow so fast in 2021?

Installs surged between 6 and 11 February 2021 after Twitter’s public dispute with the Indian government over blocking accounts linked to the farmers’ protest; several ministers, including Piyush Goyal, joined Koo during this period, giving the app rapid, government-adjacent visibility.

Why did Koo ultimately fail?

According to ThePrint’s July 2024 reporting, talks with larger potential partners and acquirers, including Dailyhunt, repeatedly fell through, the company needed years of “patient capital” it could no longer raise amid a broader funding winter, and technology and content-moderation costs remained high relative to a revenue base that TechCrunch reported was still under one million monthly active users by September 2023.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Wikipedia, “Koo (social network),” accessed September 2026
• Business Today, “EXCLUSIVE: India’s Twitter alternative Koo now reaches 4,800 towns and cities,” October 2022
• Business Today, “Little yellow bird says its final goodbye: India’s Twitter rival Koo shuts down,” July 2024
• ThePrint, “Social media app Koo, X’s rival in India, shuts down operations,” July 2024
• TechCrunch, “Twitter rival in India Koo will let users self-verify,” April 2022
• TechCrunch, “Indian social network Koo gains popularity in Brazil but faces moderation challenges,” November 2022
• TechCrunch, “Koo, India’s Twitter alternative, seeks strategic partner amid funding crunch,” September 2023
• TechCrunch, “Dailyhunt in talks to acquire social network startup Koo,” February 2024

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