All big and successful ventures have humble beginnings and none other than Infosys can vouch for this. Hold on Bengaluru and India, we have another one in the making. Our homegrown, organic app Koo was born at a small office in Jayanagar just like how Infosys took baby steps from a garage of its founder NR Narayana Murthy’s house in the same locality. On a wintery evening in November 2019, there was some serious discussions between IIM-A management graduate Aprameya Radhakrishna and his colleague B Mayank over developing a non-English app for "expression and exchange of ideas platform." This was an extension to the existing voice app called Vocal developed by the duo who own Bombinate Technologies.
The idea that germinated at this small office in Jayanagar took four months to take shape up and in March 2020, Kannada’s first opinion sharing platform Koo – the desi version of a Twitter model was launched in a small way. Initially, personal invitations were sent out by Aprameya to a select group of people including journalists to come on board. During Covid lockdown, the app was downloaded and was used extensively.
And the rest is history. From Kannada, Koo got developed into seven Indian languages and English. And today, it is recognised by the Union government to be used for dissemination of information and communication by all its departments. Koo has also won the Prime Minister’s Aatmanirbhar app challenge. With over four million plus downloads, Koo app is ramping up to hit the next landmark.
A true blue Kannadiga and Bangalorean, Aprameya’s early schooling happened in Sri Kumaran’s school, college at MES; engineering from NIT Suratkal and MBA from IIM-A. His first successful venture was Taxiforsure which he subsequently sold to Ola.
"After selling Taxiforsure, I was discussing what all are the next waves on internet. Searching for info, connecting with other people, expression was only in the English domain and people who do not know the language were able to do it. They were just forced to become consumers without expressing. We (Karnataka) are a state of 70 million people with varied and interesting opinions on various subjects. However, we’ve never been able to express ourselves openly because most social platforms are in English. Our multi-lingual voice app Vocal was the answer to this and we had 25 million users," explains 39-year old Aprameya.
However, the next challenge was why not expression, why just voice? And so in November 2019, there was an app in the making for a larger communication module and Koo was the answer which got people into language expression. "Last week we welcomed a lot of government bodies who are posting first on Koo. The growth has been immense and we had to quickly ramp up. The momentum is great and users are loving it."
"So what’s a Koo – it’s a bird’s call – like Koyal si teri bholi Koo Koo Koo Koo," signs off Aprameya.