Is Regional-Language India Really a Digital Goldmine, or Does It Come Down to the Business Model
India had 886 million active internet users in 2024, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar’s Internet in India Report 2024. Rural India accounted for 488 million of them. 98% of total users in rural areas consumed content in a regional language.
Entrepreneurs present these kinds of numbers in almost every pitch deck. They want to close the conversation before it begins. But this large number hides more than it reveals.
That scale factor has been in conversation for a long time. Investors have heard some version of it for years. But it is not a deciding factor in whether a vernacular business survives. Because here, the business model decides the result.
Two India-made apps were built for the same 886 million regional-language internet users. One is dead, and the second one made a profit after a decade. Founders weighing whether to build for this audience should carefully review the gap between those two results before looking at any market-size statistic. The dead one was Koo, India’s Vernacular Social Network.
Inside Koo’s Collapse After the Dailyhunt Deal Fell Through
The India-made microblogging platform, Koo, was built as an alternative to X. In 2022, the company reported just ₹14 lakh in revenue against a loss of about ₹197 crore. It cut nearly a third of its staff in April 2023. When the discussion to sell the company to news platform Dailyhunt collapsed, its founders announced the complete shutdown in July 2024.
During 2021, Koo built its early user base during a 2021 and positioned itself as a more compliant alternative to X. The company explored partnerships with several larger internet firms and media houses, but the talks did not produce a deal. Koo had users, and it had a political tailwind. It did not have a plan to convert them into revenue.
What ShareChat Did Differently From Koo
ShareChat took the exact opposite route, and it made a profit after a decade. In February 2025, the company confirmed that it reached its first cash-breakeven month since launching in 2015 by cutting adjusted EBITDA losses 72%, from about ₹800 crore to ₹219 crore.
By late 2025, ShareChat’s fastest-growing revenue line was not its core vernacular social feed. It was QuickTV, a “microdrama” video format that pushed the company’s annualised revenue past ₹1,000 crore. The result came from a new content format layered on top of the vernacular base, not from vernacular content monetising on its own terms.
Why Voice Is Succeeding Where Typing Failed
The main reason why Koo failed was asking users to type in a regional script on a phone keyboard. This was a new habit for first-time internet users in India. The apps that came after it stopped asking users to type at all. There has been a notable shift from typing to voice.
The e-commerce platform Meesho tested this transition directly. In March 2026, it launched Vaani, a conversational voice-shopping assistant built to handle an entire purchase, beyond product search, unlike Amazon’s Rufus and Flipkart’s Flippi. Meesho’s CTO told Inc42 that voice usage among users with access to the assistant rose from 10% to about 40%, with a 22% lift in conversion. The tool saw over 1.5 million user interactions in its first month.
Vaani currently handles discovery and purchase, but returns, refunds and complaints still require a human. Because conversational AI struggles with accuracy in those interactions, as reported by the company.
What Is Bhashini, and Why Should Founders Care?
There is government involvement in this story: Bhashini is India’s National Language Translation Mission, launched by the Prime Minister in July 2022 under the Digital India programme. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology built and runs it, and it hosts more than 300 open AI language models covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages.
The models are built for reuse. Rajasthan has adopted Bhashini for its e-governance services, and the mission provided multilingual translation for the 2025 Maha Kumbh across 11 languages. With these models, a startup building a regional-language product does not need to train its own speech and translation models from scratch.
The Key Insights for Entrepreneurs
Three patterns separate the survivors from the failures. Meesho chose a single, measurable transaction: a purchase. ShareChat treated cost discipline as the milestone. Both waited for the voice to work before moving on to it.
Regional-language India was never short on users, but there was limited evidence. The proofs now exist in narrow and company-specific form, but they are real. Anyone building for this target audience should study how Meesho and ShareChat reached.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many internet users does India have?
As per the IAMAI-Kantar’s “Internet in India Report 2024, India had 886 million active internet users in 20.98% of total users consuming content in an Indic language, and 55% were based in rural India.
Why did Koo shut down?
Koo shut down when its acquisition talks with Dailyhunt failed, and it could not find a sustainable partnership or business model.
What is Bhashini?
Bhashini is India’s National Language Translation Mission; it hosts open AI language models covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages.
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