Indian social media platform Koo to shut down after partnership talks fail

BENGALURU (Reuters) - Indian social media platform Koo is discontinuing its services, its top boss said in a social media post.

"Our partnership talks fell through and we will be discontinuing our service to the public," a LinkedIn post from CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna and co-founder Mayank Bidawatka read.

A dearth of funding hurt the platform, and high costs for technology to keep the app running led to the shutdown, the post said.

Launched in 2020, Koo gained popularity a year later when a spat between social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and Indian lawmakers regarding the government's order to take down certain content led to politicians and others flocking to the domestic micro-blogging competitor.

In February, news website TechCrunch reported that Koo was in talks to be acquired by Indian news aggregator Dailyhunt in a share-swap agreement. The report did not specify a value for the deal amount.

The report added that Koo had raised more than $60 million till then from investors including Tiger Global and Accel.

(Reporting by Varun Hebbalalu in Bengaluru; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)