Chinese Investors Exit Their Stake From India’s Homegrown Twitter- Koo
The Chinese Venture Capital Firm Shunwei Capital has made an exit from the 9% stake they held in Bombinate Technologies, the parent company of Indian Twitter- Koo.
The company has witnessed several new Indian stakeholders that bought the minority share of the existing Chinese Investors. In the array of new investors, the former Indian Cricketer, Javagal Srinath, also showed interest in buying a stake in Bombinate Technologies.
Apart from him, Indian entrepreneurs like Ashish Hemrajani, founder of BookMyShow, Sujeet Kumar co-founder of Udaan, Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamat, and Flipkart president- Kalyan Krishnamurthy, were present in the round to buy Shunwei capitals exiting share.
“Existing investors along with a bunch of individuals have bought out Shunwei Capital’s minority stake in Bombinate Technologies Pvt Ltd, the parent company of Vokal and Koo,” the company informed in a statement.
However, the financial dealings and digits that new investors put in are still under wraps.
Javagal Srinath, former Indian cricketer and fast bowler expressed his joy and said,
“I am very happy to be backing Koo – one of India’s most talked-about social media platforms. The fact that they are building a platform to bring the voices of Indian language audiences onto the internet is commendable, and as an Indian, I extend my support to them wholeheartedly.”
Shunwei Capital, a partnership team that also included people of Chinese Origin, had earlier made an investment in Bombinate’s another app called Vokal. Since Bombinate’s focus shifted to Koo, Shunwei decided to make an exit from the company and then concluded the deal.
Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Koo, Aprameya Radhakrishna, in a statement said, “As earlier stated, we had been in discussion with Shunwei Capital to enable a smooth exit after it invested in our company 2.5 years ago while we were raising funds for Vokal and have now fully exited the parent company Bombinate Technologies.”
Shunwei Capital owned more than 9 per cent in Bombinate Technologies, disclosed the statement. It further added, “It is important to note that Koo has been one of the first companies in India to be proactive in its actions of cleaning up its cap table and has doubled down on its commitment to build an AtmaNirbhar app for India and the world.”
Koo is a made in India app and a key player of PM Narendra Modi vision of “Aatmanirbhar Bharat“.
Earlier, Koo had to face flak for having Chinese investors on its Board.
Koo, an Indian microblogging platform, garnered attention when the Indian Minister for Commerce informed his followers on Twitter, “Connect with me on this (Koo) Indian micro-blogging platform for real-time, exciting and exclusive updates.”, a subsequent action of a row of fight between Twitter and Government of India, over defying the ban on certain Twitter accounts that the government had asked them to do.
The platform allows the users to send text, audio, or video in multiple Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Marathi. Over 40 lakhs users have become a part of this microblogging platform, a clone to Twitter.
