Twitter rival Koo layoff 30% of the staff due to lack of funds

Koo, a Twitter Inc. rival in India, has fired almost a third of its employees in recent months as the firm struggles with losses and an inability to raise funds.The three-year-old microblogging app dismissed 30% of its about 260 workers as the “global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work toward proving unit economics,” a spokesperson for the company, backed by Tiger Global, said in a reply to queries by Bloomberg News.The company said it is well capitalized with its recent fund raise of $10 million in January.

"We aren't looking at raising funds right now. We are making great progress with revenue and will look to raise funds in the future as necessary," the spokesperson added. In September last year, the micro-blogging platform laid off at least 40 people, mostly from its operations and backend teams, "realigning its workforce to the current business requirements". Koo, which is aiming to reach the 100 million download mark, had said it continues to "recruit talent especially as far as engineering and machine learning teams are concerned". In its latest statement, Koo said the global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work towards proving unit economics." In just three years of launch, Koo has over 60 million app downloads and is the second largest micro-blog available to the world with more than 20 global languages," the company spokesperson told IANS.