Beijing-headquartered Shunwei Capital has sold its minority stake in Bombinate Technologies, the parent company of microblogging platform Koo. The Chinese firm was shown the exit door after a flurry of Indian A-list entrepreneurs bought over its 9 percent stake in the company.

Share Market Live

NSE

The new investors include former Indian cricketer Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan Co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamat.

"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," said Srinath.

The exit of the Chinese firm comes at a time when the Indian government's regulations on investors from the neighbour and focus on programmes like Atmanirbhar Bharat has prompted Chinese players to leave the Indian startup field that it once dominated.

Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO and Co-founder of Koo however said that the Chinese investor was in discussion with the firm for an exit strategy for a while. “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," he said.

The exit of Chinese players is also a relief for the platform that faced allegations about alleged data leak and funding from China.

The fast-growing vernacular platform Koo has over 40 lakh users including IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. The app won the Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge held in August and grew rapidly in less than a year of its introduction owing to Twitter’s tussle with the government over its direction to remove nearly 1,400 controversial accounts.

With inputs from agencies

First Published:Mar 17, 2021 7:53 PM IST