Koo, India’s Twitter rival has shutdown.
Koo cracked 2 things which very few startups have cracked (esp in Bharat market):
- A blue ocean of opportunities
No social network was going after non-English market, and - Early backers.
It’s not easy raising even $10mn for a social network in a post-FB world (Koo ended up raising $70mn).
(read: Koo’s missed chaupal opportunity).
Why did Koo fail? Not just because of lack of funding, but wrong approach to solve the problem. Koo started with a great intent but ended up aligning with politician’s nationalistic approach.
It was essentially a bird with only the right wing
Of course, the team tried to do course corrections, but I believe it was too late in the game to go back and fix the platform and the perception.
What’s up with Ola’s Krutrim?
Krutrim cracked 2 things which startups in India’s deep tech ecosystem have always failed to:
- A blue ocean of opportunities
Building LLM for India is stil a huge opportunity - imagine licensing it to businesses for them to build custom solutions (quality data specific to India being the core here). - Early backers
Who turns a unicorn without a product to showcase? Krutrim did.
Nationalism as a GTM strategy…always works
Like Koo, the nationalistic agenda runs deep in krutrim - which is a great go to market strategy.
Nationalistic agenda: This is what Koo did and this is what Krutrim did to gain attention.
And then, no further product improvement. For both companies. This is what happened with Koo and seems to be happening with Krutrim chatbot.
This is Krutrim’s screenshot as of today (July 4th).
The nationalistic agenda comes with an expiry date and Koo’s journey is a testament to that.
Leaving aside the fact that Krutrim hasn’t released any tech papers or shared their training model details for India’s AI ecosystem to get excited and contribute to the platform.
Again, great founder with great capability, but the intent (so far) seems to be not to serve the audience with a useful product, but to make nationalistic claims.
The only big difference and I believe it is the future of Krutrim is the cloud service.
Krutrim cloud is a good start keeping in mind the cost of GPUs and I am hoping that Krutrim will move away from a consumer facing chatbot to platform business, as the consumer chatbot is just serving the founders nationalistic agenda - and nothing else.
And yeah, kudos to Bhavish for walking the talk - by moving away from Azure to Krutrim cloud.
I am guessing that an engineering driven ‘maniacal’ founder is the biggest leverage krutrim has.
What’s your take?
