Social media platform Koo has halted salary payments to its employees, starting from April, as it struggles to find buyers or investors. The company is experiencing cash constraints, and future salaries can only be disbursed once Koo secures an investor or a buyer, Mayank Bidawatka, Co-founder of Koo, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Bidawatka mentioned that all discussions regarding investment or acquisition are on hold due to the funding winter. Nonetheless, he said Koo will continue to operate.
“We have done everything to extend our runway so that employees and vendors could get paid. We’ve also resorted to salary cuts. It’s painful to cut salaries of people who’ve helped build the company,” Bidawatka said.
“We had the option of either letting a good part of the workforce go or do a haircut for everyone. We did the latter. This way everyone could sustain without having to look for a job at a time when hiring across startups is at its all-time low,” he added.
Bidawatka alluded in a previous post that Koo was considering a strategic partnership among other routes to grow its user base. “With the current reality of a slow investor market, the best way forward is to partner with someone who has the distribution strength to give Koo a massive user impetus and help it grow.”
As per media reports, news aggregator Dailyhunt was the forerunner to acquire the social media platform. As of FY22, Dailyhunt claimed to have over 350 million monthly active users.
Founded in 2020 by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo is a microblogging platform focused on Indian languages. It is funded by Tiger Global, Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, 3one4 Capital, and others.
Edited by Suman Singh
