[Funding] Tiger Global leads $30 mn Series B fundraise in Indian-Twitter-alternative, Koo

Indian microblogging app, Koo, has raised $30 million in Series B funding. Tiger Global has led the investment round. Existing investors Accel Partners, 3One4 Capital, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream Incubator also participated in the round. IIFL and Mirae Assets are other new investors who have come on board the cap table with this round. Talking about the investment, 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 onboard to realize this dream.”

The fresh round of funding will help strengthen engineering and product. The company also aims to bolster community efforts across all Indian languages at Koo.

The Koo app gained momentum after many Government officials shifted to Koo. Winner of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge, the Koo app, is available in 11 Indian languages. Similar to Twitter, it helps celebrities and others interact with local communities. Some of the big names who signed up for Koo include Bollywood biggies Anupam Kher, Kangna Ranaut; Union ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad, Piyush Goyal and Smriti Irani; Congress Leader Kamal Nath, former PM Deve Gowda, Supriya Sule of the NCP, Chandrashekhar Azad of Bhim Army, Upendra Khushwaha from JDU, Rajendra Pal Gautham from AAP; sports celebrities including Saina Nehwal, Bhaichung Bhutia, Javagal Srinath, Mary Kom, Deepak Hooda amongst many others.

Criticism on Koo

In February, French Hacker, Elliot Alderson (aka Robert Baptiste) has accused the app of exposing its users’ personal data. To which, Radhakrishna stated that this was not a data leak. He said that the data visible is something that the user has voluntarily shown on their profile of Koo. It cannot be termed a data leak. If you visit a user profile you can see it anyway. The founder has also busted the claims of the Chinese Origin of the company. When a Twitter user commented that the app is Chinese, Aprameya, shared a screenshot from the website whois. He stated that the company is Indian via the details from whois. Further, in the screenshot, we can see that the IP location of the app is Maharashtra.