Despite becoming a hit early on thanks to quirky stickers and a privacy feature that let teenagers hide chats from parents, Hike's messenger app overtime failed to challenge the popularity of WhatsApp
Kavin Bharti Mittal, a scion of the family behind India’s second-biggest wireless operator, is planning to revive his struggling technology startup more than four years after it was valued at $1.4 billion by backers including Softbank Group Corp.
Since attaining unicorn status in 2016, New Delhi-based Hike Pvt. has suffered a string of setbacks. The latest blow came last month when it shut down its signature messaging app -- a platform that grabbed the attention of other investors such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Foxconn Technology Group for taking on WhatsApp in the local market.
That setback doesn’t mean the end of the road for Hike, the 33-year-old son of Bharti Airtel Ltd.’s billionaire-chairman Sunil Mittal, said in an interview last week. In a bid to rekindle growth, he’s now betting on a Facebook-like new social networking platform that promises to weed out "creeps" and "fake profiles" as well as a gaming app that aims to tap rising demand in the world’s second-most populous country.
"This is the most excited I’ve been in 18 months," Mittal said. Hike would go back to investors to raise funds sometime this year, he said, declining to elaborate.
Mittal’s attempt to salvage the startup highlights the struggle faced by many Indian technology entrepreneurs who are chasing a market of more than a billion consumers with a smartphone user base that’s projected to surpass 750 million this year, with online entertainment to financial products and shopping. While some of them have aspired to become local versions of Facebook Inc. or an Amazon.com Inc., few have so far succeeded in even coming close to beating the U.S. giants.
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