Layoffs at Koo: Twitter rival Koo cuts 30% jobs over the course of the year amid global slowdown

Layoffs at Koo: In a season full of layoffs, an Indian company Koo, which is a home grown rival to Twitter, has decided lay off 30 per cent of its workeforce. This the second mass layoff at the micro-blogging site as it had also removed 40 people in September last year. The layoff came in the wake of job cuts by global micro-blogging site giants like Meta, which announced on Wednesday to cut jobs in a long-term push to whittle away 10,000 positions this year. 

"Like most startups Koo also built in a workforce to account for spikes. Given the current market environment and external realities of a global slowdown, we get affected too. Some of the most profitable companies in the world have shed tens of 1000s of jobs. We are a young startup with a long way ahead of us. The global sentiment right now is more focused on efficiency than growth and businesses need to work towards proving unit economics.

The layoffs have been announced at a time when the company says that it has sufficient funds and is on the right growth track. 

“We are well capitalised with our recent fund raise of $10 million in January 2023. 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."

In just three years of its launch, Koo has over 60 million app downloads and is the second-largest microblog available to the world with 20+ global languages.

Koo claims it started its monetisation experiments in September 2022 and within six months, it had one of the highest ARPU per DAU compared to Indian social media companies and direct global competitors.

With over 100+ brands advertising on the platform, the company says it will continue to experiment with monetisation to build a sustainable business. 

"It's important for businesses of all sizes to adopt efficient and conservative approaches to see this period through. In line with this, we have acted on some role redundancies by letting go of 30% of our workforce over the course of the year," the company said.

Koo said it would support laid off employees through compensation packages, extended health benefits, and outplacement services.