Chinese VC exits investment in parent firm of Twitter’s Indian rival

Bombinate Technologies, the parent firm of Indian microblogging platform Koo, has announced the exit of Shunwei Capital after existing and new investors bought out the Chinese venture capital firm’s 9% minority stake in the startup.

Koo co-founders Mayank Bidawatka (left) and Aprameya Radhakrishna / Photo credit: Koo

New investors including former Indian cricketer Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, and Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamat have participated in the financing round to buy out Shunwei Capital’s shares.

Founded in March 2020, Koo is known as US-based Twitter’s rival in India. The homegrown platform allows people from across the country’s different regions to express themselves in languages including Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, and English.

Bombinate also runs Vokal, a Quora-like question-and-answer platform in Indian languages.

The company was in discussions with Shunwei Capital for “a smooth exit” after the VC firm invested while Bombinate was raising funds for Vokal nearly three years ago, said Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna.

Koo is also reportedly experiencing a surge in popularity after Twitter clashed with the Indian government, a sign of the growing political challenges for social media services.

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Koo had around 2.6 million installs from Indian app stores last year and saw a 20x increase in daily active users after Twitter’s run-in with the government.