India, with 160 million active daily users, is the biggest market for Mountain View, California’s WhatsApp that is available in 10 different languages prevalent in the country. However, Hike Messenger, founded in 2012 by Kavin Mittal, is competing with WhatsApp in India and has just raised substantial venture capital.
In August 2016, Hike Messenger, raised $175 million in a fresh round of funding led by Tencent Holdings and Foxconn Technology Group, and it has become a part of the unicorn club of startups in India with a valuation of almost $1.4 billion.
Forbes says: This messaging app has been the fastest of the pack to reach the milestone, in just about three and half years after its launch. What it has, apart from the dizzy valuation, is a 100 million user base that sends more than 1 billion messages a day.
Hike’s salient features are:
- the ability to send messages without an internet connection so that users can chat when offline
- users can send messages to non-Hike numbers
- a built-in camera app that users can use to take photos and videos and share them
- the app has over 15 live filters and 10,000+ stickers in 40 languages
- an interactive AI bot, ” Natasha”
