Hike Messenger recently raised around $175 million through investor funding, a major portion of which was offered by Tencent Holdings Ltd and Foxconn Technology Group. This massive investment has made Hike the latest tech unicorn in the country, with a total valuation of $1.4 billion.
The investments were made in Series D of the messaging application’s funding round. Apart from Tencent and Foxconn, investors like Tiger Global, SoftBank Group and Bharti Enterprises also financed the app. Hike raised $65 million in 2014 when Tiger Global Management monetarily backed the enterprise in the Series C round.
Hike is a standard messaging platform that was launched in 2012. It is mainly targeted at Indian youth with specific features like free voice calling, stickers and privacy options to hide chats. Over the years, Hike introduced options to deliver live cricket updates, news and file sharing among other things. It has an estimated 100 million users, 95% of which are said to be from India.
Hike is used to send around 40 billion messages a month and users apparently spend approximately 120 minutes each week on the messenger. It is a tough competitor to the Facebook-owned Whatsapp Messenger in terms of Indian users. It arose out of a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Softbank Group, together dubbed BSB.
With this latest round of fund-raising, Hike boasts of having raked in $261 million dollars in backing altogether. Just a few months into its launch, the startup secured $7 million from BSB. Hike intends to use the latest investment it has received to continue improve the app’s technology and functionality. It will soon provide end-to-end encryption for chats.
We look forward to seeing the kind of changes this mega investment will help the developers bring to Hike.