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Koo Breaks Its Chinese Ties Bunch of individuals including former Indian pacer and current ICC match referee Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow's Ashish Hemrajani, and others have bought Shunwei Capital's minority stake from Koo's parent company

By Debarghya Sil

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Homegrown alternative of Twitter, Koo—which shot to fame recently after a brief period of altercation between the Indian government and the US-based micro-blogging site—on Wednesday announced that its chinese investor Shunwei Capital will be exiting.

Bunch of individuals including former Indian pacer and current ICC match referee Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow's Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan's co-founder Sujeet Kumar and Flipkart's CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy have bought out Shunwei Capital's minority stake in Bombinate Technologies Pvt Ltd, the parent company of Koo and Vokal.

Shunwei Capital has held around 9 per cent stake in Bombinate Technologies. Koo is a microblogging platform for thoughts and opinions voiced in Indian languages. Users can easily create their thoughts using text, audio or video in multiple Indian languages and share them with the community at large. The startup was founded in March 2020 by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. Post the Republic Day violence, many Indian government office handles and personal accounts along with celebrities moved to Koo and even asked their followers to follow them on Koo for future updates.

Commenting on the investment, Srinath,said, "I am very happy to be backing Koo—one of India's most talked about social media platforms. The fact that they are building a platform to bring the voices of Indian language audiences onto the Internet is commendable and as an Indian, I extend my support to them wholeheartedly."

Also Read: Baby Koo Pecks At Teenage Twitter

Radhakrishna, chief executive officer and Co-founder, Koo said, "As earlier stated, we had been in discussion with Shunwei Capital to enable a smooth exit after it invested in our company 2.5 years ago while we were raising funds for Vokal and have now fully exited the parent company Bombinate Technologies."

Currently, the Koo app boasts 4.3 million downloads.

Debarghya Sil

Entrepreneur Staff

Former Correspondent

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