#Asia Dropbox, WordPress Founders back Indian instant messaging app Hike

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Senior Dropbox executives Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi also participated in the round

Instant Messaging service

India-based instant messaging (IM) app Hike has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Quora Founder Adam D’Angelo and WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

Senior executives at Dropbox, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, also participated in the round.

All participants have invested in their personal capacity and will be acting as Advisors to Hike, as per an official statement.

“It’s great to have the world’s top brains in tech share Hike’s vision; and not just entrust us with their investment, but more importantly, also advise us on our product and strategy. Each of the them brings with him/her a core area of expertise, which we at Hike find immensely useful as we aggressively grow in India,” said Founder and CEO Kavin Mittal.

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Hike was started in 2012 by Kavin, son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of India’s largest telecom company Bharti Airtel. Hike is a unit of Bharti SoftBank Holdings (BSB), a joint venture of Bharti Enterprises and Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.

Unlike other popular IM apps like WhatsApp, Hike supports eight Indian languages, including Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati and Bengali. It enables users to share files without Internet using its Hike Direct feature. Free group calls with up to 100 people is also possible on the app. Users can also hide their private chats.

The app claims to have acquired 70 million users in the last three years and transact over 30 billion messages per month.

Previously, Hike had raised US$86 million in multiple rounds that include a US$7 million in 2013 and a US$14 million in April 2014 — both from BSB. Three months later, it received US$65 million led by Tiger Global and BSB in August 2014.

The post Dropbox, WordPress Founders back Indian instant messaging app Hike appeared first on e27.

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