Koo, a home-grown micro-blogging app that focusses on local Indian languages, is targeting to cross 100 million downloads in two years before monetising the platform.
The platform clocked about 20 million downloads so far since its launch in March 2020. It gained huge traction last year after Twitter’s spat with the Union government over taking down certain handles. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s praise of the platform in one of the ‘Mann Ki Baat’ speeches last year also helped it gain users.
Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Koo, said that crossing the 20 million download mark is remarkable, considering its focus on local languages.
The start-up is expanding its employee base to support its growth plans. The company, which has 300 employees, is planning to double the number of engineers to about 130 from the present strength of 65.
“There is a huge potential for growth. There are about 90 crore Internet users in the country but the bulk of the social media platforms target only English-speaking users. There is a huge chunk of users, who don’t know English, that want to express themselves on the Internet platforms,” he said.
“Our USP is to make the language users to converse with their favourite celebrities and politicians,” he said.
The start-up raised $34 million so far from investors such as Accel, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream Incubator in two rounds of funding.
“We have enough funds for growth for the next two years. We will be focussing on developing the product further and reaching out to expand the basket of users in other languages,” he said.
Plans for expansion
After consolidating its presence in the country, Koo will expand its operations to countries in Africa, South Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, where people speak more than one language.
Asked whether the micro-blogging app is able to attract users that make serious discussions, he said it was already happening in Hindi, the Koo’s biggest base so far.
“The political parties have started issuing statements on the platform which are being picked by mainstream publications. It is a matter of fact before that happens in other vernacular languages,” he said.
After Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali are the biggest user bases for the start-up.
He said the platform allowed users to post in one language and get the audience in other popular languages automatically. “We have introduced a translation tool, which allows the users to choose the language or languages for automatic translations of the post. You don’t get this tool on other platforms. Your reach is much bigger when you post something on Koo,” he said.