Koo Terminates 5% Of Its Employees On Performance Basis

Twitter's India version Koo has laid off 5% of it employees in the last month in order to fill up the financial void. Also, one of the company's spokesperson also claimed "5% of the total workforce have been made redundant or removed due to performance issues. This is completely aligned with the industry standards of hiring and retrenchment. At the same time, Koo continues to hire talent in its monetisation, product and engineering teams. The additional hires will help the company gear up for the next phase of growth and monetisation, which the company has already announced."

As per the sources, most of these employees were working in the operations and backend teams in Delhi and North India locations. 

 However, the number of employees laid off from the Bengaluru office has not been disclosed. Further he added, “Koo is at a phase of rapid growth as we proudly steer digital inclusion for native language speakers. We recently attained a major milestone of 45 Mn downloads, growing 10x in the last two months. 

In order to overcome the financial crunch Koo Ceo Aprameya Radhakrishna said that she is in contact with the number of investors for the fresh funding rounds and very soon they will succeed in their objective. As per the recent reports CEO of the start-up has been travelling to the foreign countries and till date managed to raise the investment of $44.5 million by the investors like Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Tiger Global and 3one4 Capital. 

Founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Bidawatka in 2020, Koo is established extensively in English, Hindi and in other Indian regional languages like Bengali and Tamil. Last September Koo said that it is looking for expansion and will hire 300 employees in the coming one year across various verticals. However, due to the fund crunch the start-up is forced to fire employees. 

Koo has raised $44.1 Mn so far.  Around $4.1 million was raised in a series A round, followed by $30 million in a series B round led by Tiger Global, which also had participation by early stage investors like Accel, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream incubator. In Feb 2022, Koo raised another $10 million through Indian family offices. The company is well capitalized, is focused on growth and enhancing innovation, driving digital inclusion and attaining 100 million downloads.