Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: That the global microblogging website Twitter is facing rough weather in India became apparent on Wednesday with reports that its indigenously-developed social networking challenger Koo has successfully raised USD 30 million (Rs. 218 crores) in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global, showing the way the wind is blowing.
With this fresh funding, Koo’s valuation has jumped to over USD 100 million, which is four times up from USD 25 million in February 2021.
“We have aggressive plans to grow into one of the world’s largest social media platforms in the next few years. Every Indian is cheering for us to get there soon,” said Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-Founder, and CEO of Koo, adding it would use this capital infusion to strengthen engineering, product, and community efforts in Indian languages.
Koo, also known as Koo App, is an Indian microblogging and social networking service developed by a Bengaluru-based company. It won the Government of India’s Aatmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge in August 2020. It was first launched in Kannada and now supports English and Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi.
Existing investors Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, and Dream Incubator participated in this new funding round as well, media reported.
Apart from Tiger Global, IIFL and Mirae Assets are other new investors who have come on board with this round.
In March, Shunwei Capital, the only Chinese investor, had exited from Koo’s parent company, Bombinate Technologies, after Indian start-up investors bought its stake in the firm.