Koo Claims It’s Second Only To Twitter Amid Losses
The Koo app claims to have clocked 50 million downloads in less than three years. Its financials don’t paint as rosy a picture.
The Koo app has claimed to be the second-largest microblogging platform in the world, even as the Indian alternative to Twitter remains unprofitable.
With 237.8 million monetisable daily active users and more than 1 billion downloads, Twitter continues to be the world's largest microblogging platform, amid a restructuring exercise triggered by Elon Musk.
Koo, launched less than three years ago, recently clocked more than 50 million downloads, according to a press statement issued on Wednesday. AppBrain pegged that figure at 30 million. It has so far handed out more than 7,500 yellow ticks of eminence and 1,00,000 green self-verification ticks.
The company's co-founder, Mayank Bidawatka, cited the numbers in a LinkedIn post.
However, the company didn't disclose its active user count—considered a better metric. “The monthly active user number keeps changing every month and has been rising over the last few months,” Koo told BQ Prime, over WhatsApp.
Financials
The app’s parent, however, isn’t in the pink of health, as far as its financials are concerned.
Bombinate Technologies Pvt. clocked a total revenue of a little over Rs 78 lakh, while losses came in excess of Rs 35 crore in the financial year ended March 31, 2021, according to data sourced from Tofler.
The financials for 2021-22 were not available. The company refused to share details of its funding rounds so far, its current valuation, shareholders and shareholding pattern.
In comparison, Twitter Inc. had an operating income of $272 million on a revenue of $5.07 billion in the financial year ended Dec. 31, 2021.
The Story So Far
Founded by Bidawatka and Aprameya Radhakrishna in March 2020, Koo won the ‘Atmanirbhar App’ award the same year. It then shot into the limelight during the farmer protests in February 2021, when Twitter was mired in a controversy over what constitutes free speech on the platform. Following this, several Indian politicians joined the indigenous app.
In April this year, Koo launched the voluntary self-verification process whereby a user can self-verify their profile on the platform by using a government-approved identity card.
“We will continue to invest in our product with a user-first mindset and further drive digital independence for users in India and across the world,” Radhakrishna, co-founder and chief executive officer at Koo, said in the statement.
The app, available in 10 languages and operational in more than 100 countries, competes with the likes of Twitter, Gettr, Truth Social, Mastodon and Parler in the global microblogging space.