Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of the now-defunct microblogging platform Koo, has shut down his AI-powered photo-sharing startup PicSee less than a year after its launch, choosing to return the bulk of investor capital rather than pursue another pivot. The startup, operated under Bengaluru-based Bidawatka’s venture studio Billion Hearts Software Technologies, will return nearly 65% of the roughly ₹33 crore it had raised to investors, including Blume Ventures, General Catalyst, and Athera Venture Partners, along with several angel backers.
PicSee launched in October 2025, co-founded by Bidawatka and former Koo executive Sarthak Gupta. The app used AI-powered face recognition to help users automatically find and exchange photos from large group collections — a reciprocal sharing model built to remove the friction of manually requesting pictures after events. The product found an audience among existing user groups, but scaling beyond early adopters proved harder than expected.
“We had the product. We just couldn’t crack the distribution,” Bidawatka wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the closure. The company found it could retain the users it acquired, but converting individual sign-ups into entire connected friend networks — the mechanism PicSee’s sharing model depended on — did not scale despite testing multiple growth approaches.
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The shutdown is Bidawatka’s second in as many major ventures. Koo, the microblogging platform he co-founded as an X alternative, ceased operations in 2024 after acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed, despite having raised over $60 million from investors including Tiger Global and Accel and reaching a valuation of nearly $300 million.
Returning unused capital rather than extending runway on an uncertain pivot is uncommon in India’s startup ecosystem, where founders typically continue experimenting until funds are exhausted. Bidawatka’s decision to proactively wind down PicSee while cash remained on the balance sheet stands out against that pattern, even as Billion Hearts Software Technologies is expected to continue operating as a venture studio for future ventures.
