 "How Hike Messenger is developing itself into an integrated app")
“Everyday I have to delete some apps from my phone,” Kavin Bharti Mittal says. Kavin is the CEO of Hike messenger, India’s answer to WhatsApp.
This week, Kavin roped in Silicon Valley biggies like Quora founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and Ruchi Sanghvi, board member at Paytm, as advisors and investors in his four-year-old startup. Flipkart board member and Dropbox vice president Aditya Agarwal also invested in Hike in this round. The amount of funding is undisclosed.
Ironically, apart from Mullenweg, all the other new investors have worked at Facebook, Hike’s biggest rival in India.
“In 2012, when we started building Hike, people thought we were crazy. Now, when the internet user base has reached a critical mass and people do their ordinary chores through mobile apps, time has come to partner with several of these services providers and integrate them into Hike in 2016,” said Kavin.
To solve data and storage bottlenecks which a majority of low-end smartphone users in India face, Kavin plans to morph Hike into an all-encompassing application where people can buy groceries, book a cab, or order food.
Hike has also partnered with other service providers to provide real time news, weather, and cash-back deals within its messenger app.
Kavin’s argument is simple. Why do people have to install so many apps if one integrated app can find the nearest cinema, book tickets, and receive them on a messenger application?
Hike will also be looking for a large funding round in the new year, beyond the investments raised this week. In 2014, it raised $65 million from Tiger Global Management.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.