Indian messenger service Hike has completed another investment round, securing business ties with China and taking the company’s valuation to $1.4 billion.
The latest round brings the app into unicorn territory and marks it as one of India’s top start-ups. CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal, who founded the company in 2012, raised $175 million in a funding round supported by Tencent, the company behind China’s biggest messenger app WeChat, and Taiwan’s Foxconn. Total investment in the business now stands at $250 million.
The Indian app has pushed to the forefront of the market with its colourful stickers and ability to send messages via SMS, something that gives a huge advantage over its competitors in a country whose population rarely uses mobile data.
Link with China’s Tencent
Investment from Chinese messaging company Tencent will have been a major coup for Hike, given its knowledge of the sector and cutting-edge technology.
Tencent said that Hike “deeply understands” the Indian market, and says it it on a “mission synergistic to ours”. Tencent president Martin Lau added that “Hike will be able to leverage our deep domain expertise in the messaging platform space to provide more value to its users in India”.
Earlier this year Hike announced it hit over 100 million registered users, with 40 billion messages exchanged each month. Hike has a long road ahead, however; the most popular instant messaging app in India currently is Facebook-owned Whatsapp, a difficult app to dislodge from the top spot. Drawing on his biggest user demographic – 90 percent are under 30 – Hike has added stickers, coupons and mobile games, which attract over 100 million play sessions per month.