Koo cofounder urges Elon Musk to work with Twitter’s rival in India

• Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Monday morning announced Elon Musk’s decision to not join the company’s board.
• Koo CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna tweeted out to Musk a few hours later asking him to give Koo a shot.
• Koo currently has over 20 million users from India and Nigeria, where Twitter was banned for seven months last year.

Hours after Twitter’s chief executive (CEO) Parag Agrawal announced Elon Musk’s decision to not join the company’s board, the CEO of Indian microblogging website Koo took to Twitter to grab the tech mogul’s attention.

Aprameya Radhakrishna — who founded Koo in 2020 — tweeted out to Musk once again asking him to give Koo a shot. “@elonmusk let's talk sometime! We're young, agile and dreaming big! Koo being built as the future of social media,” the tweet read.

The 39-year-old also emphasised that the company already allows users to voluntarily verify their accounts using a government-approved identification. This was in reference to Musk’s previous tweet where he advocated the Indian government’s view of giving social media users an option to verify themselves.

Koo had announced this self verification feature on its platform last week. It is currently only enabled for Aadhaar cards due to its wide usage, but it will soon accept other forms of government identifications. All self verified profiles will host a green tick next to the name, which will be different from the yellow tick mark for eminent personalities and people.

The company’s cofounder Mayank Bidawatka also took a jibe at Twitter last month. Bidawatka mentioned that he did not fully understand the fuss around the edit button as Koo has had it for over 20 months now. Only a day before this remark, Tesla CEO Musk had grabbed a seat on Twitter’s board and held a poll on the platform asking users if they would like to have an edit button option.

Musk — CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — owns 9.2% stake in Twitter.

Radhakrishna had urged Musk to join Koo last month as well. Replying to one of Musk’s tweets on free speech, he said Koo is giving voice to the larger non-English audience of the world.

Koo currently has over 20 million users from India and Nigeria, where Twitter was banned for seven months last year. The company has raised over $44 million to date from marquee investors like Mirae Asset Capital, Tiger Global, BharatPe’s Ashneer Grover and Dream Incubator, among others.

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