A look at Koo’s Series B round, shareholding and ESOP structure

India’s Twitter rival Koo announced its $30 million Series B round on Wednesday and led by New York-based hedge fund Tiger Global, making it the second primary infusion after a $4.1 million Series A round from its existing backers in February.

While the company did not divulge much details of its Series B, Fintrackr has seen the regulatory filings which show Koo has allotted 48,798 Series B preference shares at Rs 42,474.98 per share to raise Rs 207.3 crore or $28.5 million.

Tiger Global has spearheaded the round with $15 million followed by IIFL and 3one4 Capital who have invested $4.5 million and $4 million respectively. Kalaari Capital and Accel Partners have invested $2 million and $1 million respectively. 

Dream Incubator, Rebrook PTE, Mirae Assets and several angel investors including Sujeet Kumar have invested the remaining sum.

Post this round, Koo’s co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna’s stake has been diluted to 27.62% from 33.12% during the Series A round in February. Co-founder Mayank Bidawatka holds a 0.1% stake. 

Among the investors, Accel has the largest stake of 15.89% followed by Tiger Global which has 11.72% stake whereas Kalaari and 3one4 Capital have 9.55% and 8.35% stake in the 15-month-old firm respectively.

According to Fintrackr’s estimates, Koo has reached the post-money valuation of Rs 805 crore or $110 million in the Series B round.

The regulatory filings further show that Shunwei held 14,639 Series A1 preference shares which accounted for a 7.78% stake in Koo’s parent Bombinate Technologies. 

Though the filings show that the Chinese investor still holds these shares, the company’s spokesperson said that Shunwei's shareholding has been offloaded completely and that will reflect soon.

It’s worth noting that Shunwei had announced that former Indian Cricketer Javagal Srinath, BookMyShow founder Ashish Hemrajani, Udaan’s co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamathad participated in a round to buy out the shares of the Chinese VC firm.

After the transfer of shares to these secondary buyers, the shareholding pattern will change to reflect their updated holdings and Fintrackr will post an update once it is done.

The complete shareholding of Koo can be seen below. Caveat: As the 7.78% stake held by Shunwei has now been acquired by existing and new investors, we have adjusted it in the others’ section in the pie chart.  

In a separate filing, the company has also passed a separate resolution to increase its ESOP pool by 7,487 options to 25,055 options and it's now worth Rs 107 crore or $14.5 million. 

Launched in March 2020 by Radhakrishna and Bidawatka, Koo positions itself as a microblogging platform meant for local language users of India. In its first full financial year of operation or FY21, the company has posted Rs 48,000 in revenue with losses of Rs 22.9 crore, a usual for any pre-revenue startup.

Koo claims to have garnered over 6 million downloads since inception and had 4.7 million monthly active users or MAU and 0.6 million daily active users or DAUs in April 2o21. The company’s broadest and lone competitor is Twitter which has over 17.5 million active users in India.