Chinese Investment In Koo 'Clean-Bowled': Eminent Investors Including Javagal Srinath To Buy Out Shunwei Stake

A team of investors which includes former Indian Cricketer Javagal Srinath have bought out the stake of Chinese venture capital firm Shunwei Capital in Made-In-India micro-blogging platform Koo, Economic Times has reported.

Shunwei, decided to give up its 9 per cent minority stake in Koo's parent company Bombinate Technologies, amid criticism of a Chinese stake in which has been dubbed as a homegrown rival to Twitter. It has now fully exited the company.

In February, Koo's founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna had assured that the company was in talks with Shunwei to exit Koo.

"As stated earlier, 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. It has now fully exited the parent company Bombinate Technologies", Radhakrishna has been quoted as saying.

Shunwei's stake has been bought by eminent investors namely - Javagal Srinath, Bookmyshow founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, and Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamath.

Koo has been developed as an Atmanirbhar Bharat alternative to Twitter and offers its services in regional languages like Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi. One can also use it in English, which can be toggled on in the settings menu.

Koo was awarded the second prize in the AatmaNirbhar App Challenge and Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself endorsed its usage in his Maan Ki Baat. Koo was also awarded by Google as one of the best apps in the Everyday Essentials category.

Founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka in March last year, Koo has made a big splash in the Indian market in a short time span. It has over a million play store downloads and is on the seventh spot in the social media apps category in the iOS store.

Koo has also raised $4 million in Series A funding from Mohandas Pai’s 3one4 Capital.

Amid rising interest, Koo though needs to iron over a few pressing issues.

It remains to be seen whether rise of applications like Koo would mark a shift towards Made-In-India social media platforms - a demand of many amid rising Big Tech tyranny against Conservative and Right Wing voices.