Hike Messenger

» see hike.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

hike never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was an india-coded product through and through, designed for the indian smartphone moment that opened up around 2014 when low-end androids hit price points that put a phone in every household. when i was on whatsapp talking to family on a cheap android, hike was a tab in the indian app store i had no reason to open.

kavin bharti mittal launched hike in december 2012 as a joint venture between his father's bharti enterprises and softbank. the pitch was direct: india needed its own messenger, not a us app translated into a few languages. hike leaned into stickers in indian languages and small data-sized payloads for 2g networks where typing in english was a barrier. the product worked. by january 2016 it crossed 100 million registered users. by august it was india's youngest unicorn at $1.4 billion.

then whatsapp learned hindi, reliance jio gave away free 4g for two years and dragged the entire country onto data plans, and the network effect that hike had been racing did its usual thing. on 6 january 2021 the company announced it was shutting the messenger down and pivoting to gaming through its rush brand. the founder posted that they could not compete with global messaging platforms. it was the most honest startup eulogy of the year.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

hike caught india right when smartphones got cheap enough to be everywhere but before whatsapp had built out hindi sticker packs and vernacular keyboards. for that window hike felt like the future. it raised $175m in series d at unicorn status, and mittal was on every business panel in delhi.

~ the slide ~

two things broke hike. whatsapp shipped status and voice notes through 2017, then video calling and full hindi sticker packs through 2018. each shipped feature closed a hike differentiator. at the same time reliance jio's 2016 launch dragged 100 million indians onto cheap data, which made data-saving messaging less of a selling point. the product hike had been losing ground was no longer the product anyone wanted.

by 2019 hike was rebuilding around a "social messenger" pivot that nobody understood. by 2020 the team was openly searching for a second act. the messenger shutdown in january 2021 was less a death than an admission.

~ what it became ~

hike's holding company never went bankrupt. mittal pivoted to rush, a real-money gaming app, then to vibe, a virtual-world product. neither has hike's reach. the brand was archived for a few years and then quietly relaunched on app stores in september 2025 after india's gaming regulation changes opened a door. the new hike has nothing to do with the messenger; it shares only the name and the founder.

what got buried with hike is the idea that india could field its own consumer-tech champion against a us platform inside india's own market. wechat did it in china under a great firewall. hike tried it in an open market and lost. the lesson the indian vc class took home was that consumer-tech in india would either be a wrapper on a global platform or a vertical play in payments and commerce. messaging was over.

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