Hike Messenger raises $65 million from foreign investors

Instant messaging application hike messenger on Wednesday said it has crossed the 35 million user mark and is handling over 10 billion messages and 3 billion stickers per month. Hike, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Corporation, has also raised $65 million, its biggest round of funding yet. The funding is led by Tiger Global, a New York-based investment firm and followed by Bharti SoftBank.

Commenting on the latest round of funding, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike, said, "This is a big milestone for us. We've almost doubled our user base, adding 15 million users in the last 2 months itself. We can see that our users love hike and we're now doing over 10 billion messages per month. We have a great shot at becoming the first mobile-Internet company for India to cross 100 million users and we're extremely excited to have Tiger Global join us on our mission to bring India online".

The company will use the funds for product development and marketing, apart from hiring best industry talent and grow its team from the current number of 100 people, Mittal added.

Tiger Global has also been bullish on the Indian tech space and is understood to have already made investments into a number of companies, including Flipkart, travel website MakeMyTrip and Just Dial. The firm invests mainly in global internet, technology, real estate, telecommunications, energy, media, and retail sectors. It has a focus on the US, China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

Hike competes with a plethora of instant messaging (IM) apps including Whatsapp with 600 million users globally and largest in terms of usage in India, besides Facebook Messenger, Viber, Google Talk, China's We Chat, Japan's Line and Nimbuzz in India.