From Zero to a $1.4 Billion Dream: The Hike Messenger Story
On 12 December 2012, 12/12/12, a new messaging app called Hike was launched. Its founder, Kavin Bharti Mittal, had studied at Imperial College London and had already started a mobile-apps company, AppSpark, at the age of 20. He came back to India with a bold idea: build a messenger made for India.
Hike did not begin as a lone garage project. It came out of Bharti SoftBank, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Japan’s SoftBank, set up to incubate mobile internet ideas. Kavin was the son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder of Airtel, and was part of that venture’s management. In April 2013, Bharti SoftBank backed Hike with its first funding round of $7 million.
Taking On the Giants
The odds were steep. Global messaging platforms already dominated phones around the world, and Hike was an Indian newcomer asking people to switch. The early product offered free messaging, themes, stickers, and a hidden chat option, a small feature with a clear understanding of how young people actually used their phones.
Hike decided not to copy the giants. It chose to be local.
The Sticker Revolution
India speaks many languages, and typing in them on a phone keyboard is awkward. Hike’s answer was stickers: small pictures that carry emotion, humour, and culture without a single typed word.
The company built a large library of them. By 2016, Hike said it had more than 10,000 stickers capturing the nuances of 40 languages. Kavin called stickers a “monstrous hit” because they helped users get past language barriers. In 2016 he said that three billion stickers had been exchanged on Hike. In March 2015, the company even launched the Great Indian Sticker Challenge, inviting people to help create more.
This became Hike’s most distinctive marketing idea. Instead of selling “another chat app,” Hike sold a more expressive, more Indian way to talk, and aimed it squarely at young people with a fun, hip image.
The Rise
Investors took notice. In August 2014, Hike raised $65 million in a round that included Tiger Global and Bharti SoftBank.
Then came 16 August 2016. Hike announced a $175 million Series D round, led by China’s Tencent, the company behind WeChat, and Taiwan’s Foxconn. The valuation: $1.4 billion. Hike became a unicorn just 3.7 years after launch, one of the fastest in India. It reported 100 million users, about 90 per cent of them in India.
An executive at Foxconn’s mobile arm said Hike’s “hyperlocal strategy” made it the company of choice for the investment. For a startup born only a few years earlier, it was a moment of real validation.
Reinventing the Messenger
Hike kept evolving. In April 2019, the app was reborn as Hike Sticker Chat. It used machine learning to suggest stickers for the moment and the mood, in a library of over 30,000 stickers across 40 Indian languages. Users could also create their own HikeMoji avatars. The idea was ambitious: to make much of chatting a keyboard-free experience.
The Hardest Chapter
Despite the funding, the stickers, and the buzz, Hike never displaced WhatsApp as India’s go-to messaging app. On 6 January 2021, Kavin announced that Hike Sticker Chat would shut down at 11:59 pm on 14 January 2021. The app was removed from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
Days later he wrote on Twitter, “India won’t have its own messenger,” adding that global network effects were too strong. It was a candid admission from a founder who had spent years promoting his messenger as a rival to the world’s biggest apps.
A New Direction
The story did not end with that announcement. The company turned its focus to two new products: Vibe, a social platform, and Rush, a gaming platform featuring games such as Carrom and Ludo. Hikemoji was set to continue inside them.
What Hike’s Story Teaches
Hike’s journey holds lessons for any builder:
Start with a real local need. Stickers solved a genuine problem in a country of many languages.
Be bold, even against giants. A startup launched on 12/12/12 became a unicorn in under four years.
Know when to pivot. Closing a flagship product is painful, but Hike chose to carry its learnings into new ideas instead of standing still.
Hike Messenger may no longer sit on anyone’s home screen, but its story remains a reminder that daring to build something Indian, expressive, and different can take a young company remarkably far.
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