New Delhi, Sep 15 (PTI) Homegrown microblogging platform Koo is scouting for funding or a strategic partnership for its next phase of growth, its co-founder Mayank Bidawatka said on Friday.

"The next phase for Koo is to build scale, and that will happen with either funding or through a strategic partnership with someone who already has scale.

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"With the current reality of a slow investor market, the best way forward is to partner with someone who has the distribution strength to give Koo a massive user impetus and help it grow," Bidawatka wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Notably, applications like Koo gained ground a few years back following clarion calls for expanding the ecosystem of homegrown digital platforms.

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Terming 2023 as "one of the toughest years for the startup ecosystem", Bidawatka said the company was caught in a sour market timing and had to switch gears from a growth trajectory to a revenue-generating engine.

"As most other founders and investors will agree, 2023 has been one of the toughest years for the startup ecosystem around the world. Funding has come to a standstill, and only near-breakeven or early-stage startups are lucky to raise funds.

"While our stable state plan was to scale more before generating revenue, Koo too was caught in this unfortunately sour market timing and had to switch gears from a growth trajectory to a revenue-generating engine," Bidawatka said.

He claimed that with 6 months more on their trajectory, Koo "would have beaten Twitter in India".

"But, we had to become more efficient by curbing expenses and start generating revenue. It takes years to build a globally competitive microblog. Even Threads, from the Godfather of social platforms, is taking time to build basic features."

In August, Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder of the homegrown microblogging platform, said Koo's strategy involves not directly competing with X (previously known as Twitter) or the recently introduced Threads by Meta and instead targets regional audiences through its language-centric approach.

"We still believe that a microblog built for the native language speakers is the most inclusive way to take microblogging to the larger world. 80 per cent of the world speaks a native language, other than English, and they too deserve a language first platform to express themselves and connect better," Bidawatka said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)