Chinese investor Shunwei Capital, which had invested $5 million along with other investors in microblogging service Koo’s parent Bombinate Technologies in 2018, has now exited the enterprise. The investment in the company’s Vokal platform, which was akin to the Q&A platform Quora, that offered Shunwei with a small more than 9 per cent stake has now been purchased out by the parent’s current investors along with a ‘bunch of individuals,’ according to the enterprise. Former Indian cricketer Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow Founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan Co-Founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, and Zerodha Founder Nikhil Kamath participated in the round to obtain Shunwei’s stake.
“As earlier stated, we had been in discussion with Shunwei Capital to enable a smooth exit after it invested in our company 2.5 years ago while we were raising funds for Vokal and have now fully exited the parent company Bombinate Technologies,” Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO and Co-founder, Koo stated in a enterprise statement.
Koo hogged the limelight not too long ago amid the Modi government’s spat with Twitter more than the latter’s alleged non-compliance of law with respect to the alleged spread of misinformation on farmer’s protest by numerous accounts on the microblogging website. Koo was capable to garner proper-wing assistance in the light of the protest as nicely as the Atmanirbhar Bharat programme. Vokal counted Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, 500 Startups, Accel Partners amongst its investors. In the previous handful of weeks, A-listers and who’s who of the entertainment, politics, and corporate worlds like Anupam Kher, Kangana Ranaut, Piyush Goyal, Prakash Javadekar, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Smriti Irani, and more along with a number of ministries and government organisations had joined Koo.
TheSpuzz Online had explained in February about’s Koo prospective path to develop into a potent player in the microblogging marketplace and take on Twitter in the distant future.
“Putting celebs in any brand helps but it is based on user experience, the service’s overall functionality, data security, and accessibility. Endorsements may work for a shorter duration but if the app is not stable and sustainable in the long run, it won’t work irrespective of the audience you cater to. Google had also tried Google+ but it didn’t find adoption even as there were multiple top profiles on the app,” Anoop Mishra, one of India’s top social media specialists had earlier told TheSpuzz Online.
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In February this year, the app was flagged for leaking user information. French ethical hacker Robert Baptiste, who goes by Elliot Alderson on Twitter and had final year flagged a safety concern in the Aarogya Setu app, has now accused the app of leaking user particulars such as e mail, date of birth, marital status, and so on. However, Radhakrishna in his rebuttal to the improvement tweeted on Thursday that “the data visible is something that the user has voluntarily shown on their profile of Koo. It cannot be termed a data leak. If you visit a user profile you can see it anyway.”
India’s social network customers are anticipated to develop from 326 million to 447 million in 2023, according to the information from Statista. The nation is currently the second-biggest social media marketplace worldwide immediately after China that will have more than 1.1 billion online customers accessing social networks in 2025, up from 926.8 million social network customers in 2020. Currently, India is the third most significant marketplace for Twitter with 17.5 million customers as of January 2021. In comparison, Facebook had an eye-popping 320 million customers in India – its biggest marketplace as of January 2021 although its every day active customers as of Q3 2020 stood at 1.75 billion globally.