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Micro-blogging platform Koo, the homegrown rival of Twitter, has laid off nearly 40 employees from its operations and backend team amid a funding crunch, multiple sources told Inc42.

The laid off employees were mostly working in Delhi and other north Indian offices, one of the sources said.

The layoffs took place over the last one month amidst a lot of people leaving the social media startup, the sources said.

Responding to Inc42’s query on the issue, a Koo spokesperson said that the startup’s workforce
has been streamlined to ensure it is aligned to the current business requirements. However, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup did not disclose the number of employees who were let go.

“Koo is at a phase of rapid growth as we proudly steer digital inclusion for native language speakers. We recently attained a major milestone of 45 Mn downloads, growing 10x in the last two months,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“The growth that we are witnessing in our business is reflected in our employee strength of 350+ people strong. We continue to recruit talent especially as far as engineering and machine learning teams are concerned. Our workforce is streamlined to ensure it is aligned to the current business requirements…,” the spokesperson added.

Koo Faces Funding Crunch

The development comes at a time when Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna has been camping overseas and is in talks with several investors for a fresh round of funding. The startup has raised $44.5 Mn till date and is backed by investors like Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Accel, and 3one4 Capital.

“Aprameya is talking to HNIs and global funds to raise fresh funding and was in London recently for the same purpose. However, there is no success yet on the fundraise,” a source said.

Notably, Koo was one of the top advertisers on Meta (Facebook), as per a recent report by Hyderabad-based enterprise digital marketing agency Pyrite Technologies. Koo, as per the report, was second on the list of top advertisers on Meta, behind spiritual guru Sadhguru.

It spent INR 8.67 Cr on advertising on Meta platform during April 27-July 25 period, more than the spends of the ruling BJP, UNICEF, among others, as per the report.

The microblogging platform last raised $10 Mn (INR 79 Cr) in two tranches from more than a dozen investors, including Capier Venture Partner, Ravi Modi Family Trust, and Ashneer Grover, in February this year.

Prior to that, Koo raised $30 Mn in a Series B round led by Tiger Global and various other investors in May 2021.

Koo, founded in March 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidwatka, shot to fame amidst an intense stand-off between the government and Twitter over social media intermediary guidelines. The startup was one of the first social media companies to come out in support of the Indian government’s new social media guidelines or IT Rules, which came into force last year.

Bombinate Technologies, the parent entity of Koo, spent INR 24.7 Cr to earn INR 7.7 Lakh in the financial year 2020-21 (FY21). It posted a loss of INR 35 Cr during the year, while its expenses surged 75% to INR 24.7 Cr from INR 14.1 Cr in FY20.

Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna recently told Inc42, in an exclusive interaction, that the micro-blogging platform will go to the market to raise funds at the right time. “We have raised $40-45 Mn so far with $30 Mn from Tiger and $10 Mn from Indian family offices as the last two rounds,” he added.

Radhakrishna further said that monetisation will happen once the startup captures the market. “That’s not a problem. There are enough ways that the US, as well as Chinese social media, have made money. So the important thing is to capture the market. That’s what we’re doing. That’s where we’re spending time,” Radhakrishna said.