Why India’s Twitter Rival Koo With 60 Million Downloads Could Not Survive

There is a specific kind of startup failure that is harder to process than the straightforward kind.

Not the startup that ran out of money because nobody wanted the product. Not the one with bad founders or a broken team. The hard kind is when the product was genuinely good, the timing was defensible, the founders had done it before, and still somehow it did not work.

Koo is that kind of failure. And 4 years after it launched, it deserves a proper accounting.

The Man Who Had Already Done It Once

Aprameya Radhakrishna is not the kind of person who stumbles into entrepreneurship. He holds a B.E. in Electronics and Communication from NIT Karnataka and an MBA in General Management from IIM Ahmedabad. He spent time as a software engineer at Infosys, then as Head of Business Development at Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, then made the leap.

In 2010, he co-founded TaxiForSure with Raghunandan G., which in 2015 was acquired by Ola Cabs for $200 million. A $200 million exit before the age of 35 gives you two things: capital and credibility. But Radhakrishna was not done.

After exiting TaxiForSure in 2015, he started thinking about the next big impact business. He noticed that everybody who was new to the internet was only watching videos. For the wider audience, it would have to be with products that work in a language that people know.

That observation became Vokal in 2017, built together with Mayank Bidawatka. Vokal was a user-generated content platform in 11 Indian languages, described variously as a Quora with audio, designed for the first-generation internet user from a small town in UP or Bihar who had a smartphone but had never used English to search for anything.

Within one year, Vokal amassed over a million users. But its users were telling the founders something unexpected. They did not just want to answer questions. They wanted to connect, express, and follow people they found interesting. That feedback, from actual users in actual Indian towns, planted the seed of what became Koo.

“We kept experimenting. Our first product was Vokal, where the community actually told us that they didn’t want to just answer questions,” Radhakrishna said later.

In November 2019, he and Mayank Bidawatka registered Bombinate Technologies and began building Koo, a microblogging platform with Twitter’s core mechanics, designed natively for Indian languages.

The Problem That Nobody Else Was Solving

Here is what India looked like in 2019 from a social media perspective.

Facebook and WhatsApp had the largest user bases and were already deeply embedded in Indian consumer behaviour. YouTube was the dominant video platform. Instagram was growing fast among urban youth. And Twitter had approximately 23 million users in India, a large number in absolute terms, negligible as a percentage of 1.4 billion people.

The reason Twitter remained a niche product in India was structural. Its product was built around English. Its trending algorithms amplified English content. Its power users, the journalists, politicians, and public intellectuals whose content drove engagement, overwhelmingly operated in English. For the 900 million Indians who think, argue, joke, and express emotion most naturally in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, or Marathi, Twitter was not a comfortable space.

Aprameya Radhakrishna articulated the founding premise clearly: “Koo has been built with a lot of heart. We saw a big gap between the languages the world speaks and the fact that most social products, especially X/Twitter in India, are English dominant. In a world where 80% of the population speaks a language other than English, this is a strong need. We wanted to democratize expression and enable a better way to connect people in their local languages.”

The idea was genuinely correct. The question was always whether correct was enough.

The Day the Government Handed Koo Everything

February 2021 gave Koo something no startup can buy: a political moment that turned it into a national conversation overnight.

The Indian government and Twitter entered a high-profile standoff over content removal requests. Twitter, citing editorial independence and transparency concerns, did not fully comply with directives to remove certain accounts and content. The government indicated it might restrict the platform’s operations in India if compliance was not forthcoming.

What happened next was extraordinary. Union ministers began publicly announcing they were joining Koo. Piyush Goyal, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Smriti Irani, Dharmendra Pradhan, senior cabinet members all posted about switching to Koo. Government bodies followed. ISRO posted on Koo. The Income Tax Department created a Koo account. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology joined.

Koo won the government’s Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge, selected from some 7,000 entries across the country.

Downloads exploded. Within weeks, Koo had crossed 3 million users. In less than a year, it had crossed 10 million. By November 2022, Koo’s user base had reached 60 million.

On paper, everything was working. But this government-driven surge contained a problem that would only become visible later: the growth was externally imposed rather than organically earned. Cabinet ministers created accounts because of a political moment, not because Koo’s product experience was pulling them in. The question of whether those 60 million registered users were actually opening the app daily, posting, engaging, and returning was a different question from whether they had downloaded it.

Social media lives on daily active usage, not on download counts.

The Money: $50 Million and the Investors Who Believed

The growth attracted serious capital. In May 2021, Koo raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global, with existing investors Accel, Kalaari Capital, 3one4 Capital, Blume Ventures, and Dream Incubator also participating, along with new backers IIFL and Mirae Asset.

As of November 2022, Koo was valued at over $275 million. Total funding raised across all rounds was $50.4 million.

In 2022, Radhakrishna was recognised as one of the top 100 global tech changemakers. Koo launched in Brazil and achieved over a million downloads within 48 hours, a remarkable result that briefly suggested the platform could become a genuine global play, not just an Indian Twitter substitute.

Radhakrishna was direct about the financial model’s logic: “You actually don’t need a billion dollars to build this business.” He pointed to regional language newspapers like Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar, which generated substantial advertising revenue. “The same advertisers, given an opportunity to target regional language audiences digitally, would pay. The advertising model works. You just have to build the audience first.”

Build the audience first. That was always the plan. And it was always the risk.

The Cracks Nobody Talked About Publicly

Social media’s economics are brutal and specific. The category is winner-take-all by design. Network effects, the principle that a platform becomes more valuable the more people are on it, mean that the leader in any category compounds its advantage with every additional user, while every other player faces a progressively harder climb.

Twitter’s defensibility in India was not in its features. Koo could match or exceed Twitter’s feature set. It was in who was already on Twitter: the journalists who broke stories, the politicians whose statements became news, the commentators whose opinions shaped conversations. Koo could bring politicians onto its platform. Getting the media class, the people whose content made Twitter worth reading was structurally harder, because those users were already deeply embedded in Twitter’s professional networks.

Without the journalists, Koo’s content quality plateaus. Without quality content, ordinary users have less reason to open the app daily. Without daily active users, advertiser interest is limited. Without advertiser interest, revenue is constrained. Without revenue, the path to sustainability narrows.

Two cybersecurity incidents accelerated the trust erosion at precisely the wrong moments. A data breach in February 2021, right during the government-backed surge and a vulnerability in November 2022 that allowed profile hacking damaged user confidence at two of the most critical inflection points in the platform’s growth trajectory.

And then came the funding winter of 2023.

The Last 12 Months: Acquisitions That Almost Happened

As global capital tightened through 2023 and Indian startup funding contracted, Koo shifted strategy from organic growth to seeking a strategic buyer or partner, a company with the distribution, capital, and infrastructure to take the platform to its next phase.

The talks were extensive. Koo approached several companies including Microsoft. Negotiations with DailyHunt, India’s regional language news aggregator owned by VerSe Innovation, progressed furthest. The strategic logic was clear: DailyHunt had 350 million users, deep regional language distribution, and content infrastructure that Koo could leverage. Koo had a social platform product and a brand that DailyHunt lacked.

The deal did not materialise. Bidawatka confirmed in his LinkedIn post that “a couple of them changed priority almost close to signing.”

Close to signing. That is the specific detail that makes this story genuinely painful. Not a rejection at the first meeting. A reversal after lawyers had been engaged, terms had been discussed, and both teams had invested months in due diligence. The kind of near-miss that leaves a company in a worse position than if the talks had never started, with runway burned on negotiations, leadership bandwidth consumed, and no deal on the other side.

July 3, 2024: The LinkedIn Post That Ended It

“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” the founders wrote. “Most of them didn’t want to deal with user generated content and the wild nature of a social media company. A prolonged funding winter got the better of us.”

The founders said they had needed 5 to 6 years of aggressive, long-term, and patient capital to make Koo a huge success. That capital never came.

Radhakrishna reflected afterward: “Koo could have easily scaled internationally and given India a global brand that was truly made in India.”

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What Remains and What Comes Next

The Koo shutdown is not a story about a bad product or bad founders. It is a story about the economics of social media, the most unforgiving category in consumer technology combined with the specific difficulty of building a consumer internet company in India that is not backed by a large conglomerate, a global strategic investor, or government purchasing power.

Building an Indian alternative to Twitter requires competing with a platform that has a decade-long head start on network effects and whose core audience, journalists, politicians, commentators, has professional reasons to never leave regardless of what Indian alternatives emerge. The government moment of February 2021 created the illusion that the network effect problem was solved. It was not. It was temporarily suppressed.

After the shutdown, Bidawatka launched PicSee, an AI-based photo-sharing app, in July 2025. Soft-launched with 25 users, it scaled 75 times in under three months. Blume Ventures led a $4 million funding round in November 2024. However, PicSee itself shut down less than a year after its launch. Radhakrishna continues as an active angel investor, having backed over 35 startups across India.