Homegrown social-media company Koo, which was launched last year as a competitor to Twitter, raised $30 million as part of a Series B round, and is now valued at $150 million. The fresh round of funding will be utilised mainly to strengthen engineering, product and community efforts across all Indian languages at Koo, the company said in a statement. Koo's fundraise comes at a time when its primary competitor Twitter is going through a legal ordeal with the Delhi Police and Government of India. Twitter is fighting two battles at the same time: The first is related to a political fight between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress and the second, related to applicability of and compliance with the new Information Technology Rules 2021. “We have aggressive plans to grow into one of the world’s largest social media platforms in the next few years. Every Indian is cheering for us to get there soon. Tiger Global is the right partner to have onboard to realise this dream,” Koo co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna said in a statement. While existing investors like Tiger Global Capital, 3one4 Capital, Kalaari Capital, Accel and Blue Ventures participated in the round, the company has now roped in financial-giant IIFL’s venture capital fund and Mirae Asset Management as new investors. Koo is an Indian-made microblogging platform, which rose to sudden prominence last month as a replacement of sorts to Twitter. Koo has since become a safe space of sorts for supporters of…
