Koo, the home-grown alternative to Twitter, has laid off 30 per cent of its workforce (260 people) citing role redundancies and global market slowdown.
“Like most startups Koo also built in a workforce to account for spikes. Given the current market environment and external realities of a global slowdown, we get affected too. Some of the most profitable companies in the world have shed tens of 1000s of jobs. We are a young startup with a long way ahead of us. The global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work towards proving unit economics,” said a Koo spokesperson.
It says it has supported the laid-off staff through compensation packages, extended health benefits and outplacement services.
“We are well capitalised with our recent fund raise of $10 million in January 2023. We aren’t looking at raising funds right now. We are making great progress with revenue and will look to raise funds in the future as necessary,” the spokesperson added.
Within three years of launching, Koo has over 60 million downloads and is the second largest microblog globallywith 20+ languages. Koo started its monetisation experiments in September 2022. With over 100+ brands advertising on the platform today, Koo said it will continue to experiment with monetisation to build a sustainable business.