New Delhi: The SoftBank group-backed Hike messaging app that sought to compete against Facebook Inc., owned WhatsApp in the second-most populated country globally, shut down and disappeared from app stores on Monday.
Valued at $1.4 billion in the 2016 funding round, the start-up announced its app was going off the air earlier this month without explanation. The Delhi based firm became the tenth Indian start-up to be valued at over $1 billion then, when it raised over $261 million from top-tier investors, including SoftBank, Tiger Global, and Tencent, Foxconn, and Bharti. The business has been hiring top management to stand out in the industry since last year.
Over several years, the home-grown app started by billionaire-family scion Kavin Bharti Mittal has failed to replace Facebook Inc.'s rival app as India's go-to social media and mobile communications venue. India remains WhatsApp's largest market worldwide. The end of Hike's messenger service comes when Signal and Telegram have added tens of millions of users in recent weeks after WhatsApp updated its data-sharing policy, leading to a growing global backlash.
Hike, also supported by Chinese WeChat-operator Tencent Holdings Ltd, has diversified in no-frills phones and grown into the mobile entertainment field.
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On January 6, Mittal, son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's No. 2 telecom carrier, announced the closing of Hike StickerChat.
"India won't have its own messenger," Mittal wrote. "Global network effects are too strong (unless India bans Western companies.)"
"Today we are announcing that we will be sunsetting StickerChat in Jan'21. We thank you all for giving us your trust. We wouldn't be here without you. All your data will be available to download in the app," Mittal said in another tweet.
Hike's popularity gained new heights after its launch in 2012, before plunging due to WhatsApp influencing the masses worldwide. Hike had close to 100 million registered users by August 2016 and supported several regional Indian languages.
Mittal has gradually diversified Hike into social and virtual-mobile products over the last year few years. He wrote on Twitter that his company will continue to grow its Vibe social media app and work on Rush, a new gaming product. Vibe was first started as HikeLand inside the Hike app and later created and renamed Vibe into a social media site. Reportedly, this is an approval-based group app.
On the other side, Rush is an online competitive gaming platform where users can play skill games against each other and earn real cash.