Twitter India rival Koo lays off 40 employees

Twitter rival Koo has laid off at least 40 people in India to prune redundant staff as per its current business requirements, hinting at another failure in overcrowded social media platforms. Currently, WhatsApp and Twitter are the two laeding social platforms in India.

The development was reported by news portal Inc42, which said that Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna is currently abroad, seeking a fresh round of funding. The platform is seeking rapid growth as it plans expansion into other Indian languages soon.

“We recently attained a major milestone of 45 million downloads, growing 10x in the last 2 months. The growth that we are witnessing in our business is reflected in our employee strength of 350+ people strong,” said a spokesperson, as reported by IANS.

Koo, which is aiming to reach the 100 million-download mark, said that it wants to diversify recruitment of machine learning teams.

“Our workforce is streamlined to ensure it is aligned to the current business requirements. As a people-first company, we appreciate the talent and contributions of each of our associates,” the spokesperson added.

Launched in March 2020, Koo is currently available in 10 languages — Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and English. So far, the platform has over 45 million downloads but actively leveraged by 7,000 people from across the spectrum.

In February this year, Koo raised nearly $10 million in two different trances from investors, including Capsier Venture Partner, Ravi Modi Family Trust, Ashneer Grover, FBC Venture Partners, and Adventz Finance. Earlier, Koo raised its Series B funding from Tiger Global, Accel Partners, and Blume Ventures.