EXCLUSIVE: India’s Twitter alternative Koo now reaches 4,800 towns and cities

Serial entrepreneur Aprameya Radhakrishna, known for building ride-sharing company TaxiForSure (which was acquired by Ola for $200 million in 2015), started Koo — a language-focused microblogging platform — in early 2020. It was meant to be a homegrown, hyperlocal alternative to Twitter, and a step towards fulfilling the government’s grand ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ vision. Later that year, Koo went on to win MeitY’s Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge in the ‘Social’ category, and was also listed among Google Play Store’s "Everyday Essentials' apps. 

Within 20 months of its launch, Koo says it racked up 15 million downloads. “Our first 10 million downloads happened in about a year and a half, while the next five million users joined the platform in a quarter,” Koo Co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna tells Business Today. “Currently, we have over 45 million downloads with 7,500 eminent accounts.”

But what worked? How did Koo find its audience in a cluttered social media space where attention spans are diminishing by the day? Radhakrishna says Koo was the answer to India’s language diversity problem. “In a country like India, where more than 90 per cent of the population thinks and speaks in a regional language, the power of expression in one's mother tongue is truly immense. We noticed that the majority of the conversations on existing global social media platforms were in English. The native language speakers needed an immersive experience in their mother tongue. Koo is a solution to that problem,” he explains. 

This problem is not just India’s though. “80 per cent of the world doesn’t speak English either. They speak some native language,” he says. 

Koo’s native language proposition managed to woo some of the top venture capitalists of the world. In a little over two years, the Bengaluru-based startup has raised $64.1 million in funding from the likes of Tiger Global, Mirae Asset Management, One4 Capital, Accel, Casper, and prominent angels, including Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Ashneer Grover, among others. Koo’s last funding round came in February this year, and its valuation stood at $263 million in June, according to Tracxn. 

Radhakrishna says, “Running a language-based micro-blog is way more complex than a single language platform in multiple ways. Koo has built tech to support billions of interactions from millions of users. It has one of the most exhaustive and deep usage of language-based technologies. Right from translations to transliteration, context extraction, categorization to recommendations and personalization. The language dimension adds many complexities, apart from the fact that a lot of the language tech, especially Indian languages, is still nascent.”

Today, Koo enables interactions in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, and Punjabi, besides English. The platform allows creators to send their messages in real-time across languages while retaining the context and sentiment attached to the original text. “This enhances a user’s reach, as the message can be consumed by people across the country in a language of their choice,” says the founder.

As a result of its deep language penetration, Koo claims to be reaching users in 4,800 towns and cities of India, with over 60 per cent of those coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 regions. With growing mobile internet usage, more and more first-time users are now taking to social apps. However, Koo stakes a claim to several seasoned netizens as well. “The average age of users on Koo is between 23 to 35 years. These are not necessarily first-time internet users, but language users who didn’t have a platform to express themselves earlier,” Radhakrishna reveals. 

Despite the positive indicators, Koo — like most other social media platforms of the world — continues to battle charges of hate speech and discrimination. Its content moderation policies have come under the scanner too. The company says it follows the laws of the land. “Our structured content moderation practice complies with Indian law and leverages the expertise of both humans and machines to curb online hatred and facilitate a cleaner ecosystem. We also have a ‘Voluntary Self-Verification’ feature on the Koo app which helps to curb anonymity and the presence of nuisance creators,” the founder explains. 

Interestingly, self verification is something Elon Musk (who’s close to completing his Twitter buyout) has been pushing for a while. In April, the Tesla CEO and Twitter board member urged the social media platform to “authenticate all real humans”, which Koo claims it has already done. Radhakrishna, in fact, tweeted to Musk, asking him to try out the app. “Your specific point on democratized verification [is] already done btw,” he wrote. 

But what really are the pros of self-verification? Is it effective enough? 

He elaborates, “Self-verification empowers every user on Koo with the privilege of getting recognized as a genuine voice, something which is only available for eminent voices on other social media apps. Being a ‘genuine voice’ lends greater credibility to the thoughts and opinions that are shared. Profiles have witnessed a 75 per cent spike in followers and a 30 per cent increase in profile visits within a week of having self-verified themselves, says our analysis.”

When it comes to monetisation, however, Koo is yet to turn a corner. The platform’s annual revenues stood at $145,000 as on December 31, 2020, according to Tracxn. It reportedly incurred losses of over Rs 35 crore in FY21, and with funding drying up in 2022, operations have been crunched further. Koo also laid off nearly 5 per cent of its workforce in August. 

“These colleagues were let go for a mix of reasons like performance issues and restructuring that made some of these roles redundant. This is a constant exercise at any company,” Radhakrishna asserts. “We are still aggressively hiring people in areas such as product, analytics, and engineering. Our current workforce has a strength of 300 employees.”

But is there a clear path to monetisation and profitability? Without divulging much, the founder says, “Koo is looking at sustained growth that will be backed by experiments related to driving value to brands, creators and other stakeholders linked to the Koo ecosystem.”

Also Read: Koo relies on library of 6,300 words and phrases to spot abusive content

Also Read: Koo signs MoU with Telangana govt, to open development centre in Hyderabad