Homegrown alternative to Twitter, Koo, on Wednesday said it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by New York-based investment firm Tiger Global. Existing investors including Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, and Dream Incubator also participated in the round.
IIFL’s venture capital fund and South Korea’s Mirae Assets are other new investors who have come on board with this round.
The funding comes at a time when social media platforms, including the US-based Twitter, are facing increased government scrutiny over alleged non-compliance with India’s new IT rules for significant social media intermediaries. Koo has already complied with the rules.
Koo said the fresh funds will be utilised primarily to strengthen engineering, product and community efforts across all Indian languages.
Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and CEO of Koo, said “We have aggressive plans to grow into one of the world’s largest social media platforms in the next few years. Every Indian is cheering for us to get there soon. Tiger Global is the right partner to have on board to realize this dream.”
Koo was founded in March 2020, as a micro-blogging platform in Indian languages. It has recently refreshed its brand identity by launching a new logo.
In February, the platform had said that Chinese investor Shunwei Capital has sold its minority stake in the company. Existing investors and a bunch of individuals bought out Shunwei’s stake in Bombinate Technologies Private Limited, which is the parent company of Koo and Vokal.
New investors included former cricketer Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamat. Shunwei Capital held a 9% stake in the company and it had said in the past that it was in the process of exiting the business.
This article was first published on livemint.com