Koo is an Indian microblogging and social networking website founded in the year 2020 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. In August 2020, the app won the Government of India’s Aatmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge. The app is exclusively for Indians and is formerly known as Ku Koo Ku. The statistics show that around 2.6 million Indians installed Koo in the year 2020 compared to 2.8 crore downloads of the Twitter app. The Koo app became popular when Twitter got a week’s stand-off from the Indian government for not blocking accounts that had spread misinformation on 2020-21 Indian farmers’ protest. In this situation, Cabinet Ministers such as Piyush Goyal and other government officials became users of Koo, which resulted in the sudden rise of users for the local app.
Koo has received a $ 30 million investment through B series funding led by an American investment firm Tiger Global Management LLC along with its existing investors Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, Accel Partners, and Dream Incubator. The new investors in Koo through B series funding are IIFL and Mirae Assets. The new B series funding at Koo is aimed at improving engineering, product, and community work across all languages in India. The app has raised $4.1 million A series funding earlier with existing investors and along with 3one4 Capital by Infosys veteran Mohandas Pai.
The social media sites which reach 5 million users in our country are labeled as SSMIs and these firms should adhere to the guidelines set by Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules 2021. Koo has completed such compliance while other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram requested the government for more time to comply with such rules. In addition, Koo’s privacy policy, conditions of use and community guidelines are in adherence to rules applicable for SSMIs. Also, Koo has set up due diligence and grievance redressal management with a chief compliance officer who is a resident of India, a nodal officer, and a grievance officer. The founders of app Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka target to achieve 100 million users at the end of the current year.
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