Social media startup Koo is shutting down its service after prolonged talks for an acquisition failed.

Koo was started by Radhakrishna and Bidawatka in 2019 and was launched in March 2020. The app gained prominence amidst the standoff between the Indian government and Twitter in 2021.

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In the LinkedIn post, the founders said they built a “globally scalable product in a fraction of the time that X/Twitter did, with superior systems, algorithms, and strong stakeholder-first philosophies” Koo had positioned itself as the homegrown alternative to X (formerly Twitter).

Koo co-founders, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, “We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted. Most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company.”

“A couple of them changed priority almost close to signing. While we would’ve liked to keep the app running, the cost of technology services to keep a social media app running is high and we’ve had to take this tough decision” he said.

“We were just months away from beating Twitter in India in 2022 and could have doubled down on that short-term goal with capital behind us,” the founders said.

Koo will now evaluate converting its assets into a digital public good to enable social conversations in native languages, around the world, the founders said in the post.

“This is very difficult and complicated tech and we’ve built it painstakingly in record time. We will be happy to share some of these assets with someone with a great vision for India’s foray into social media” they said.

“A prolonged funding winter which hit us at our peak hurt our plans at the time and we had to tone down on our growth trajectory,” the founders said.

“Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue. We needed 5 to 6 years of aggressive, long term and patient capital to make this dream a reality” they added.