Aatmanirbhar Bharat: Union ministries line up to join swadeshi Twitter alternative Koo app

Koo, a social media application developed by Bombinate Technologies Private Limited has been on Google Play store and Apple App Store for quite a while but only now, it is coming into prominence in India.

In August 2020, Koo won the AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge organized by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and since then over a million people have installed the social media app on both Android and iOS.

In the past few days, several union ministries and departments including Common Services Center, Digital India, Digi Locker, India Post, National Informatics Centre (NIC), National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELIT), MeitY, MyGov, Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), and UMANG app and others have joined the Koo social media platform.

On Tuesday (February 9), another prominent leader Piyush Goyal, Ministery of Railways; Commerce & Industry; Consumer Affairs, and Food & Public Distribution too joined the Koo platform.

The new development comes amid US-based Twitter and the MeitY involved in a discussion to block 257 Twitter handles, understood to be of Pakistan and Pro-Khalistan outfits, for inciting public disorder in the garb of farm laws agitation at the Delhi border.

Twitter is yet to take action against the accounts listed by the government and has requested an appointment to meet MeitY minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to resolve the issue at the earliest.

While the company is delaying to comply with the order passed by the Indian government, many users are calling for boycotting Twitter. Now, it looks like Koo may give Twitter a run for its money. Koo is much better than its peer Tooter, which is a bad spoof version of Twitter.

Must read | Tooter: Meet the desi alternative to the Twitter social media platform

The Koo app supports multiple Indian languages including Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi. While Assamese, Marathi, Malayalam, Bangla, Oriya, Gujarati, Punjabi, and others will be added soon. Right now, Koo is trending at the top seven in the Social Media category on Apple App Store in India.

On Monday (February 8), Koo raised $4.1 million (approx. Rs 29.89 crore) as part of its Series A funding. Infosys co-founder TV Mohandas Pai (now part of 3one4 Captial) has joined the board of investors of the company.

Aprameya Radhakrishna is the CEO & co-founder of Koo and Mayank Bidawatka (co-founder), whereas Anand Daniel and Parinitha are the other two directors of the company. Sai Rama is the product manager.

Must read | Micro-blog in Kannada with Koo, a Twitter-like Indian app

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