Amidst a funding crunch, Koo, the Indian micro-blogging platform, which is regarded as the ‘Twitter of India’ has laid off 40 employees in the last one month. It has been reported that employees working in the operations and backend departments working in Delhi and other North India offices have been affected the most.
Sharing a statement with the media, Koo’s spokesperson mentions that the Ccompany is streamlining its workforce and aligning it with the business requirements of the firm. Further, the spokesperson says that recently, the microblogging platform has touched a milestone of 45 million downloads, growing 10x in the last two months. The spokesperson refrained from sharing the exact number of employees laid off by the firm.
It has been reported that Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO, Koo, is travelling and going overseas seeking fresh funding. Till date, Koo has raised $44.5 million backed by investors such as Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Accel and 3one4 Capital.
Last year, in September, Koo had announced that it is looking to expand and hire 300 employees in a period of one year, across departments. However, due to the funding crunch, it seems that the firm is now looking for cost-cutting measures. By last year, the total employee strength of Koo stood at 200.
Koo was founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, and launched in 2020. It gained popularity rapidly as it allowed use of five regional Indian languages, including Bengali, Telugu and Hindi in addition to English.
The Government of India had fallen out with Twitter, when the latter refused to take down specific accounts, which the former had claimed were disseminating false news. This worked in favour of Koo, which has received much encouragement from the Indian government as part of its self-reliance mission.
The news of layoffs at Koo was first reported by Inc42.
