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Homegrown social media platform Koo has laid off 40 employees in an effort to manage costs and streamline the business. The development comes at a time when mass layoffs have been reported in the Indian start-up sector owing to an industry-wide shortage of funding. 

According to a report by Inc42, the 40 employees who are being laid off worked in the operations and back-end team. 

Backed by Tiger Global, Koo is a homegrown rival of the social media platform Twitter. The start-up has so far raised $44.5 million, as per reports. 

A Koo reportedly stated that the company is at a phase of rapid growth and has attained a milestone of 45 million downloads. It has reportedly grown 10x in the last two months.

“The growth that we are witnessing in our business is reflected in our employee strength of 350+ people strong. We continue to recruit talent especially as far as engineering and machine learning teams are concerned. Our workforce is streamlined to ensure it is aligned to the current business requirements…,” the spokesperson added.

Founded in 2020, Koo is the brainchild of Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. The start-up became an instant hit amidst the stand-off between Twitter and the Indian government due to non-compliance with the information technology (IT) rules. 

Apart from Tiger Global, Koo is backed by Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures, Dream Incubator, IIFL, and Mirae Assets, among others.