![Koo, India’s alternative to Twitter is shutting down Koo, India’s alternative to Twitter is shutting down](https://varindia.com/storage/news/2024/07/zXxSKWTgvKjjdw9JeC8DAkl6iRrPBroarI1qmfm2.jpg)
Koo, the Indian social media platform that was started as a homegrown alternative to Twitter, will be shutting down after a “prolonged funding winter.” Founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced this in a LinkedIn post.
In a recent post on LinkedIn, the company’s co-founder Mayank Bidawatka said that they were exploring partnerships with “multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses, but these talks didn’t yield the outcome” and that “a couple of them changed priority almost close to signing.”
In an English-dominated social media landscape, Koo aspired to be an alternative to Twitter so that Indians could communicate in their native languages. However, the platform was seen as being closely aligned with India’s ruling party BJP and its followers, especially during a time when Twitter was being criticised by the government over its compliance policies.
Koo’s deal with DailyHunt also fell through. While the app did expand its presence in Brazil and logged over 1 million downloads in just 48 hours of launch, it struggled to gain traction in the Indian market.
The interface is similar to that of Twitter with the app letting users categorise their posts with hashtags and tag other users in mentions or replies. The social media network also frequently added new features like “Talk to Type” and even supported various Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Assamese and Punjabi to name a few.
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