At an event in New Delhi, India’s homegrown messaging platform, Hike Messenger has announced that it has raised a Series D financing of over USD 175 Million in a new funding round led by Tencent Holdings Limited and Foxconn Technology Group. This funding will be used by Hike to expand technlogy and other features for its messaging platform to give better experience to its users. These investors have valued the company close to USD 1.4 Billion which is a great achievement for Hike as the company started its operations just three years ago.
In this round of investment, the existing investors Tiger, Bharti and the SoftBank Group also participated. This is the fourth venture capital round and the biggest to date for Hike, taking the total investment to over USD 250 Million so far. Hike has not given break-up of funding by each investors despite being asked at the press conference.
Speaking on the occasion, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger, Kavin Bharti Mittal said, “I’m thrilled to announce this new milestone in our journey. Tencent and Foxconn both have pedigrees that speak for themselves and such an investment especially in today’s market just goes to show the strong foundation on which Hike is being built. The new fund raise is going to allow us to push Hike to greater heights and invest in areas that will be key to our long term vision and success”.
Hike Messenger is very popular platform espeially in India. Hike had annoucned in January 2016 that it has a user base of 1 billion users. The Indian popularity can be gauged from the fact that 95% of Hike users are based in India and 90% of them are young and below the age of 30. Hike users, on an average, exchange 40 Billion messages per month and spend 120 min. per user per week on the platform.
Hike’s popularity stems from the fact that it boasts of over 10,000+ stickers available in 40 languages, themes and multi-lingual user interface. The Platform makes available local content which includes News in English and Hindi, Games (Beta) on Hike, Live Cricket for latest scores and live updates of cricket played across the world etc.
Besides this, Hike gives importance to privacy features on its messages which include Hidden Mode that hides chats quickly and enable customers to choose who sees last seen, display pictures and status updates. Moreover, it covers data constraints in India also as Hike2SMS helps send free SMS when there is no internet connectivity and Hike Direct helps share files without the use of internet.
