While the government’s cold war with Twitter over the removal of questionable content regarding the farmers’ protest continues, the IT ministry has been hyping Koo, an Indian social media platform similar to Twitter. Riding on this, and Indians’ wish for a swadeshi Twitter, Koo has observed a rapidly growing upward trajectory in its user base, reaching 3 million users this week.
Downloads of the Koo app have increased by 10 times this week itself, almost doubling the number of active users from 1.5 million to 3 million, according to Koo co-founder Mayank Bidawataka. In comparison, Twitter has around 17 million users, and is used by a lot of notable personalities both national and international, including PM Narendra Modi and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Koo’s co-founder also used Twitter to comment on the rising popularity of his platform.
He tweeted “Our systems are facing more load than ever. Thankyou for placing your trust in us. Our team is working overdrive to fix it.”
Koo is an Indian app co-founded by Mayank Bidawataka and Aprameya Radhakrishna. It recently won the government’s Aatmanirbhar Innovation Challenge and is strong part of India’s aatmanirbhar (self-reliant) journey. It depends strongly on this growing demand for indigenous services to swell its user base.
However, the app is eerily similar to Twitter, with similarities extending to its logo as well. Koo has a yellow bird for its logo, while Twitter brands a Blue “Larry”- however, the Koo symbol prominently displays the Indian Tricolor to show its roots. The one specialty of Koo is that it allows users to share their thoughts and content in almost all major Indian languages – including but not only Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujrati and Bengali. The character limit for posting on the platform is 400 words.
Last week, in a series A funding round, Koo raised $4.1 million from investors like Accel, Kalari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream Incubator and 3one4 Capital. A lot of Indian ministers have joined Koo and have been inviting people to connect with them and switch platforms. These include, Minister of Railways, Piyush Goyal; Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, among others. With the rising popularity of the platform, their follower count has also been surging.
Koo is currently available to download on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store and has an average rating of 4.7 stars and 4.1 stars on these platforms respectively.
