Koo Cofounder Mayank Bidawatka Hints At Floating Consumer Tech Venture

A few days after homegrown microblogging platform Koo brought down its curtain after prolonged acquisition talks fell through, its cofounder Mayank Bidawatka has now hinted at making a comeback with a new venture.

In a LinkedIn post, Bidawatka said he is bringing an idea in the consumer tech space “that’s been close” to him for many years.

Without giving a clue on the idea, which he deems to have a huge market size, he claims that currently a team of seven members is working behind the idea. 

He also called out techies to join his new venture, which he claims to be pursuing because of “belief and passion and not out of any commercial interest, yet.”

Bidawatka has declined to Inc42’s queries on his new startup, saying that he will divulge all the details  once it is ready. 

However, given the vastness of the consumer internet space, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what the startup is going to be built around. 

For Bidawatka, a large chunk of his professional journey has been focused around the segment. After kicking off his entrepreneurial journey with redBus founding team back in 2007, he also worked with startups, including ecommerce platform Goodbox and ride hailing startup TaxiForSure, besides backing startups like Farmers’ Mandi, Exprs, Glamyo Health, Niflr and Third Wave Coffee Roasters, among others. 

His last venture Koo, which was set up in 2020 as perhaps an alternative to X (formerly Twitter), recently shut down its operations. On July 4, Bidawatka along with cofounder Aprameya Radhakrishna announced that the platform is winding up as acquisition talks with Dailyhunt didn’t pan out. 

However, it wouldn’t be fair to pin Koo’s downfall solely for the failure to get acquired. The microblogging platform, which netted over $50 Mn in its lifetime, had a minuscule top line over the last two fiscal years when compared to its losses. 

Its losses stood at INR 197 Cr in the fiscal year 2021-22 (FY22), while revenue was at INR 14 Lakh. The revenue did double from the prior fiscal’s INR 7 Lakh, which saw the platform incur a loss of INR 35 Cr. 

The “not impressive enough” financials of the startup were the reason for the startup’s failure to raise a Series C round. In his earlier post, Bidawatka said that a “prolonged funding winter” hit Koo hard at its peak. Acknowledging the startup’s troublesome bottom line, saying that Koo was caught in a sour market and had to switch its focus from growth to generating revenue. 

“With just six months more on our trajectory, we 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..,” he said in a LinkedIn post.