Koo App Wins PM Modi’s AatmaNirbhar App Challenge
Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-founder and CEO of Koo said “We’re very excited about being one of the winners of the AatmaNirbhar App Challenge. PM Modi is giving startups, innovators and entrepreneurs a very good platform to showcase their creation and we’re grateful for this opportunity. We look forward to taking Koo to a wider India that wants to connect with people in their mother tongue.”
Mayank Bidawatka, Co-founder of Koo said, “We are honored to be a part of the winning list of apps that have been selected from among the 6940 entries that the AatmaNirbhar App Challenge received. We value and appreciate the thrust our government is placing on technology innovation for a better India. It’s a proud moment for our team and our contributors to be recognized for our creation. We look forward to giving a voice to a billion Indians through Koo!”
Koo is India’s Micro-blogging platform in Indian languages. Koo was launched in March 2020 and is now available in 4 Indian Languages – Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. Just 10% of India understands English. The rest speak 100+ Indian languages. They don’t have an Indian language friendly platform to speak their mind and express themselves. Koo is a micro-blog that enables Indians to express themselves in their mother tongue.
Koo also invites some of the most prominent personalities in India so that users can follow them and their thoughts. Koo was launched just 5 months back and has seen prominent personalities like Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Shri Sadhguru, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Dr. Ashwath Narayan (Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka), Deputy Commissioner of Karnataka, MP Tejasvi Surya, Ashutosh Rana, Ashish Vidyarthi and many other Politicians, IAS Officers, Actors, Actresses and Sports personalities using it to be in touch with their followers.
Koo enables users to speak their mind using text, audio and video. They can either convey their thought in 400 characters of text or 1-minute short audio or video Koos. Some app features include following, people feed, 1-1 messaging, english to language keyboard, language news feeds and hyper local hash tags. Koo will soon launch other languages too in the coming months.
Koo has been co-founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. They are serial entrepreneurs and have built startups like TaxiForSure and redBus in their past entrepreneurial avatars.
Aatmanirbhar App Challenge: Ministry of IT and Technology (MeitY) in partnership with Atal Innovation Mission – Niti Aayog launches Digital India AatmaNirbhar Bharat Innovate Challenge to identify the best Indian Apps that are already being used by citizens and have the potential to scale and become world class Apps in their respective categories. This Innovation Challenge seeks to create an ecosystem where Indian entrepreneurs and startups are incentivised to ideate, incubate, build, nurture and sustain tech solutions that can serve not only citizens within India but also the world. The Mantra is to Make in India for India and the World.