Mumbai: Koo, India’s own microblogging platform has announced the appointment of Phaneesh Gururaj, President – Technology, to lead the engineering and innovation team at the company. In order to give shape and direction to creating a robust technology platform from India, for India, Koo has put together a best-in-class engineering team who will work closely with Phaneesh. Prior to joining Koo, Phaneesh led Engineering and Product teams at redBus.
Along with Phaneesh, the technology team will consist of Badri Narayan – VP Engineering from Google, Pavan Kunchapu – VP & Head Mobile from GoJek, Vivek Yadav – Engineering Leader & Head – Data Platforms Head from Walmart Labs. The newly appointed team with over 60-man years of experience will be tasked to further accentuate the engineering capabilities and ensure that the technology at Koo is prepared to manage the next level of scale.
Speaking about the enhanced Technology Leadership at Koo, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-Founder & CEO, said, “Koo is the first social media platform that is being built from scratch in India. With the number of languages and features Koo will eventually offer, a robust technology team will be the backbone of this effort. With tremendous experience in building and managing platforms, Phaneesh and team have the credentials to support the growth expected at Koo. We look forward to offering the users of Koo a best-in-class user experience.”
At the end of August 2021, Koo achieved 1 crore downloads in just 16 months of going live. Koo is currently available in 8 languages and has several pioneering technology features including Talk-to-Type, that enables users to speak their thoughts and the technology will type it. In response to user requirements, Koo recently unveiled a ‘dark mode’.