Microblogging startup Koo has raised $4.1 million as aspect of its Series A funding from the early-stage venture capital firm 3one4 Capital. Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, and Dream Incubator have been other investors participating in the round. 10-month-old vernacular microblogging startup Koo, which makes it possible for individuals to express themselves in native their language, will deploy the capital to boost its capabilities towards solving “uniquely Indian engineering challenges and for marketing to increase awareness about the app, the company said in a statement. The Made-in-India vernacular alternative to Twitter was co-founded by cab-hailing company TaxiForSure founder Aprameya Radhakrishna and was among the 24 winners of the Atmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge announced last year. TaxiForSure’s bigger rival Ola had acquired it back in 2015.
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“Existing microblogging platforms have not been able to grow beyond the English-speaking population. Koo enables the free expression of thoughts and opinions for every Indian irrespective of language preference. Koo will amplify the daily voices of India on an Indian platform,” stated Radhakrishna. Koo is a quite beneficial and highly effective platform in the Indian context. Social platforms focused on India need to have to be very contextualised to the audience right here beyond languages and will have to involve neighborhood, moderation, and content relevance, according to Anurag Ramdasan, Principal, 3one4 Capital. The venture firm counts former Infosys senior executive Mohandas Pai as one of its investors.
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The increasing chance in the Indian social networking segment on the back of increasing regional language customers is increasingly tapped by startups such as Koo, Tooter, Elyments, Namaste Bharat, Indian Messenger to emerge as options to Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved had also attempted its hands at social networking with its personal Kimbho app in 2018 but the strategy didn’t take off amid privacy issues. The quantity of social network customers in India has jumped from 142 million in 2015 to 326 million in 2018 and is probably to improve to 447 million by 2023, as per Statista. According to internet website traffic evaluation web site StatCounter, Facebook had 82.53 per cent social media industry share in January 2021 in India though Twitter’s share was 2.52 per cent.