With the intense spat erupting between the Centre and microblogging site Twitter over blocking of certain accounts, a new app called Koo has come into the market. Koo App is in the news these days. Koo, an Indian alternative to Twitter, has become the talk of the town as it promotes Aatmanirbhar Bharat by offering a Twitter-like experience, but in Indian languages.
Koo is a homemade version of the social networking platform. It is available as an app on both iOS and Android, and also has a webpage. Koo is the winner of the government’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat app challenge from 2020.
Koo caught public attention after the Indian government’s tussle with Twitter over the removal of inflammatory contents. It has now crossed over 3 million downloads with about a million active users.
Who founded Koo?
The site was co-founded by entrepreneurs Aparmeya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidwatka. Radhakrishna has also founded the online can booking service TaxiForSure, which was sold to Ola cabs. Koo’s parent company is Bombinate Technologies Pvt Ltd. It also launched the Indian version of Quora called Vokal.
According to data from Crunchbase, the company raised a Series A funding in 2018 from a bunch of investors that include Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital and Accel Partners India.
What is Koo App?
- It is like Twitter, which is a microblogging site. It is used to express views and opinions on various topics.
- The app supports multiple Indian regional languages. Koo supports
- Hindi
- Telugu
- Kannada
- Bengali
- Tamil
- Malayalam
- Gujarati
- Marathi
- Punjabi
- Oriya
- Assamese
- The application came into front after government’s Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge.
- All the Koo App users can share various posts, audio, video, photos on it
- Like Twitter, Koo also allows Direct Messages to be used by its users
- One can also conduct polls on the microblogging website
“We had two million users with about 1.5 million active users. Now, we have now crossed 3 million-mark,” Koo co-founder Mayank Bidawataka told PTI.
Interestingly, Koo co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna took to Twitter to highlight the rising popularity of the platform and tweeted, “Our systems are facing more load than ever. Thank you for placing your trust in us. Our team is working on overdrive to fix it”.
The move has come at a time when the largest microblogging site of the world has not responded favourably to the Government’s terms. The Indian Government then pushed an alternative in the market against the microblogging apps/ social media platforms. Top political personalities including Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal have joined the app.
The only concern using the Koo App is being cut off from the rest of the world. The domestic audience would shift to Koo but the Indian audience may not be able to connect with the global audience in case they do not use other bigger microblogging sites.
