Rival to Twitter in India, Koo has surpassed 1 crore (10 million) downloads in a short period since its launch in March 2020. Koo, who rose to fame after India's right-wing ecosystem and dispensation of power have clashed on Twitter since February of this year, and it is no coincidence that much of their growth has occurred in the last six months. Koo has had 85 lakh downloads since February. With the implicit support of the current waiver in India, Koo no doubt hopes to do even better in the coming months.
Koo expects to have 10 million million users in a year
Created by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo is available in 8 languages including Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali, and English. With an Indian-first approach to building the platform, it introduced a number of technological features that allow more Indians to participate in online conversations. According to its co-founder, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Koo has ambitions to reach a user base of Rs 10 crore in the next year. “Microblogging in India is limited to less than 2%, if you only look at English. This is the market that Koo is looking at,” he told the PTI news agency. To increase the credibility of the platform, Koo wants to integrate prominent names from various fields including politics, government, cricket, entertainment, and business. It currently has 2.500 "big handles" on the platform. Compared to Twitter, this is ridiculous. Koo, in May this year, raised €30 million in Series B funding, led by Tiger Global with existing investors Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream Incubator. The funds will be used to strengthen engineering, product and community efforts in all Indian languages at Koo. The app won the 2020 Aatmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge organized by the Government of India. It was also named Google Play Store's Best Daily Essential App for 2020 and received a Special Mention from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Mann Ki Baat speech.