India's Koo looking for 'strategic partner' to build at scale amid funding winter

New Delhi, Sep 15

Homegrown micro-blogging platform Koo, once touted as the Twitter rival but later saw its growth dwindling amid economic slowdown, is now looking to "partner with someone who has the distribution strength to give Koo a massive user impetus and help it grow", its Co-founder Mayank Bidawatka said on Friday.

In a LinkedIn post, Bidawatka said that the next phase for Koo is to "build scale and that will happen with either funding or through a strategic partnership with someone who already has scale" in the "current reality of a slow investor market".

According to reports, Koo has raised over $50 million to date.

Bidawatka said that 2023 has been one of the toughest years for the startup ecosystem around the world.

“Funding has come to a standstill and only near breakeven or early stage startups are lucky to raise funds, that too at low valuations/heavy markdowns. While our stable state plan was to scale more before generating revenue, Koo too was caught in this unfortunately sour market timing and had to switch gears from a growth trajectory to a revenue generating engine,” he elaborated.

In April this year, Koo said that it had let go 30 per cent of its workforce over the course of the year amid the current global meltdown.

The company had told IANS that it is important for businesses of all sizes to adopt efficient and conservative approaches to see this period through.

According to Bidawatka, it takes years to build a globally competitive microblog.

“From growing rapidly to cutting down on growth and proving unit economics, within 6 months of revenue experimentation, we took a 180 degree turn and proved that this is a real business. While the market is unfavourable, we as founders are committed to our dream, of taking Koo to the world and beating the best, with Indian tech,” he said.

“With a platform that's scale ready, Koo can outshine competitors with the right push on growth,” said Bidawatka.

The company last raised $10 million in January this year.