BENGALURU: At a time when the government is trying to mount a 'Koo' against Twitter, the Bengaluru based micro-blogging site, which claims to be a "truly Aatmanirbhar app", has come under the scanner -- both for allegations of leaking sensitive user data as well as the investment made by the Chinese VC firm, Shunwei Capital.
Shunwei Capital's founding partner and Chairman Jun Lei is also the CEO of smartphone brand Xiaomi that has a 23% market share in India, and owns a stake in internet startups like Sharechat, Zest Money and Touch talent, WeWork India and Hungama among others. Both Shuwei capital and Xiaomi also have a combined stake in firms like Zomato, Meesho, Loan Tap and Kuku FM.
Data sourced from Traxcn revealed Shunwei Capital had a 11% stake in 2018 in Koo's parent firm Bombinate Technologies, which was then running a vernacular Q and A platform, Vokal. The Chinese fund was the lead investor in the $5-million Series A funding round then.
Koo CEO and co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna in his response said that Shuwei Capital is in the process of exiting the firm completely and its stake is now diluted to a single-digit percentage. The development comes even as Koo's parent firm revealed last week that it had raised $4.1 million from Indian investors including 3one4 capital, Kalaari capital, Accel and Blume ventures.
Meanwhile, French internet researcher Elliot Anderson questioned Aprameya's claim that user data on the social media app is completely safe. Anderson said he spent 30 minutes on Koo and found that sensitive data of users including email addresses, phone numbers, gender, date of births are being leaked.
Aprameya dismissed Anderson's concerns. "Some news about data leaking being spoken about unnecessarily. Please read this: The data visible is something that the user has voluntarily shown on their profile of Koo. It cannot be termed a data leak. If you visit a user profile, you can see it anyway," he tweeted.
He added that 95% of Koo users were logging in through their mobile phone number as "Language communities of India do not use email to login and hence was not the priority of the company (sic.). Email login was introduced recently. Now that concerns have been raised it has already been blocked from view," he said in a statement.
Cybersecurity expert and founder CEO, Progressive tech, Prateek Garg told The New Indian Express that user data on third-party applications like Twitter, Facebook and Koo does get used for marketing/ business purposes, and a large part of personal data is utilised with the user consent.
"The often-cited instances of data leak are nowadays very rare and the firms (Third Party Apps) partner with the tech companies to address the vulnerabilities. The biggest challenge however remains involuntary usage of personal data of users," Garg added.
Aprameya had earlier said that the intent behind creating the app was to connect rural India and help communities network in local languages, something he stressed was not possible on platforms like Twitter.
Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told lawmakers in parliament on Thursday that he is proud of Koo that had won the government's Digital India Aatmanirbhar Innovate challenge last year.
"Koo is a made-in-India app that has become a toast for success today and we should be proud of it. It is a matter of pride for me that Indians are heading so many multi-technology companies. Let us salute the extraordinary courage of our start-ups," he noted.
Koo has claimed that it has recently crossed 3 million downloads with 1.2 million of those coming in the months of January and February 2021. Several union cabinet ministers and Chief Ministers of BJP-ruled states are now on the micro-blogging site. Other celebrities on the app include cricketers Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath.
Koo is currently available in English, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada languages and will be soon introducing Marathi, Bangla, Gujarati, Priya, Punjabi and Assamese on the platform.