India messaging app raises $65m in Tiger Global-led round

Hike's parent company Bharti SoftBank, a joint venture between India's Bharti Enterprises and Japan's SoftBank Corp, also took part in the round.

Launched in 2012, Hike competes with messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Line. The company claims to have more than 35 million users, over 90% of whom are from India. The investment will be used to further develop the product and build the start-up's team.

"We've almost doubled our user base, adding 15 million users in the last two months," said Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO of Hike, in a statement. "We can see that our users love hike and we're now doing over 10 Billion messages per month."

India is the world's second-biggest mobile phone market after China by number of users. Smart phone sales have surged in the past two years following the launch of high-speed networks, making the country the world's third-biggest smart phone market.

According to a recent report by International Data Corporation (IDC), India was the highest growing market in Asia Pacific with year-on-year smart phone shipment growth of over 186% in first quarter of 2014. This compares to 31% year-on-year growth for China.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Venture
• India
• Venture
• Technology
• Tiger Global Management