Tiger wants the yellow bird 🐤

Less than 24 hours after the Twitter shakedown, Tiger Global has now led a $30 million Series B round in Twitter’s desi clone, Koo, alongside Mirae Asset, IIFL, and Blume Ventures, valuing the company at $100 million.

The backdrop—the investment couldn’t have come at a better time for Koo, as western social platforms in India, which dominated the social game for better part of the last decade, now broadly lock horns with GOI on data sharing, localization, and other policing issues, as demanded by compliance with the new IT rules, and the whim of the government.

So far, Koo’s playing its shots well—the app has managed to scale up to nearly 6 million users, a fraction of the 55 million+ users Twitter has in India, but we doubt there’s a serious overlap between addressable bases anyway.  Fresh funds will go to accelerate growth, and improve platform functionality.

Bottomline—hard to see Koo become a Twitter alternative in India, especially as the latter transforms around a better use case, as a “discovery” layer for the creator economy. But we’re certain Dorsey is going to wake up with an “India” engagement problem in a couple of quarters, after losing a “certain” faction of politically argumentative users.