Koo Lays Off 260 Employees or 30% of Its Staff In A Year; No Plans For Further Layoffs

Koo, Twitter’s rival company in India, on Thursday said the company has laid off 30 per cent of its workforce, or 260 employees, over the course of the year. The company also said Koo does not have any plans for further layoffs.

“We are well capitalised with our recent fundraise of $10 million in January 2023. We aren’t looking at raising funds right now. We are making great progress with revenue and will look to raise funds in the future as necessary,” Koo said in a statement.

In September 2022, Koo laid off at least 15 persons, mostly from its operations and backend teams, “realigning its workforce to the current business requirements”.

The company said it is important for businesses of all sizes to adopt efficient and conservative approaches to see this period through.

“In line with this, we have acted on some role redundancies by letting go of 30% of our workforce over the course of the year and have supported them through compensation packages, extended health benefits and outplacement services,” it said.

Like most startups, Koo also built in a workforce to account for spikes. Given the current market environment and external realities of a global slowdown, we get affected too, according to the statement.

It also said some of the most profitable companies in the world have shed tens of 1000s of jobs. We are a young startup with a long way ahead of us. The global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work towards proving unit economics.

The TigerGlobal-backed Koo was launched in March 2020 as a multi-lingual, micro-blogging platform to enable Indians to express themselves online in their mother tongue. Currently, Koo has over 60 million app downloads and is the second largest microblog available to the world with over 20 global languages.

Koo started its monetization experiments in September 2022 and within 6 months we have one of the highest ARPU per DAU compared to Indian social media companies and direct global competitors. With over 100+ brands advertising on the platform, we will continue to experiment with monetization to build a sustainable business.

(The story has been updated with Koo’s statement)

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