Homegrown Twitter rival Koo lays off 40 employees in 'realignment' move

Homegrown Twitter rival Koo has laid off at least 40 people, mostly from its operations and backend teams, and the micro-blogging platform said on Thursday that it is "realigning its workforce aceto the current business requirements".

The development was first reported by leading startup news portal Inc42, which said that Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna is currently abroad, seeking a fresh round of funding.

A Koo spokesperson told IANS that the platform is at a phase of rapid growth as it steers digital inclusion for native language speakers.

"We recently attained a major milestone of 45 million downloads, growing 10x in the last 2 months. The growth that we are witnessing in our business is reflected in our employee strength of 350+ people strong," said the spokesperson.

Koo, which is aiming to reach the 100 million-download mark, said that it continues to "recruit talent especially as far as engineering and machine learning teams are concerned".

"Our workforce is streamlined to ensure it is aligned to the current business requirements. As a people-first company, we appreciate the talent and contributions of each of our associates," the spokesperson added.

Launched in March 2020, Koo is currently available in 10 languages -- Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and English.

According to the platform, it has over 45 million downloads and is actively leveraged by 7,000 high-profile people from across the spectrum.

In February this year, Koo raised nearly $10 million in two different trances from multiple investors.

The investors included Capsier Venture Partner, Ravi Modi Family Trust, Ashneer Grover, FBC Venture Partners, Adventz Finance etc, according to regulatory filings.

Last year, Koo raised its Series B funding from Tiger Global, Accel Partners, and Blume Ventures.