Koo Founder Mayank Bidawatka announces new venture to boost consumer tech

Koo founder's new venture: After curtains came down on microblogging platform Koo and probable acquisition talks did not materialise, its founder Mayank Bidawatka has announced launch of a new venture, Billion Hearts Software Technologies.  

The venture is aimed to build consumer products for global users. “Billion Hearts as a name represents the dreams of many. And hopefully the usage of billions of users around the world for whom this startup will build beautiful digital products,” Bidawatka told Linkedin.

The new venture at present is operating in stealth mode and is scheduled for a roll out in the next few months.

In a post, Bidawatka had recently said that the new venture has already secured angel funding from several founder friends in the marquee consumer tech space.

This comes in the wake of Bidawatka hinting of a possible comeback earlier this year. Bidawatka had said that the new venture will be  consumer tech based, a project he has been mulling for several years. Back then,  Bidawtka had stated that a team of seven persons was working to firm up the idea.

Prior to starting Koo, Bidawatka had also built ventures such as Goodbox and The Media Ant.

Touted as India’s alternative to Twitter, Koo, which had 10 million active users made an announcement on July 3 that it was shutting down after failed acquisition discussions.

Bidawatka had posted on LinkedIn that the company had explored partnerships with multiple internet platforms and media houses. However, the talks didn’t lead to any outcome, he had added. The Koo co-founder had stated that most companies did not want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media platform.

Koo had around 3 million users in January 2021 and traffic to the platform was increasing every day before its performance took a hit. The Koo app was launched in the year 2020 and won the Aatmanirbhar App Challenge organised by the government.