Hike gets $7 mln investment boost; to take on WhatsApp in India, Japan
With Bharti and SoftBank putting some serious cash behind Hike, the company aims to quadruple its user base by the end of the year
Mobile Messaging service Hike has just managed to raise $7 million for an aggressive expansion plan. The goal is to top the existing reigning king of messaging apps, WhatsApp. The cool $7 million comes courtesy of Bharti SoftBank (SBS), which is a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Japanese operator SoftBank that was established in 2011.
BSB has set out with a rather strong plans for expansion across the world, partly the push for which comes from the fact that Hike crossed 5 million registered sometime last month. Whatsapp in comparison boasts close to 200 million registered users. BSB hopes that they can raise the 5 million number to 20 million by the end of the year.
BSB says that their expansion plan isn’t outlandish, seeing as how the two companies backing it have a serious local hold. Both SoftBank and Bharti Airtel have a strong grip on the telecommunications business in their respective countries of operation. The plan could work seeing as how apps like Kakao Talk, a Korea based chat app has a 100 million users and WeChat, a Chinese chat app has close to 300 million downloads. Seeing as India has a population of over a billion people and that Hike is available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, S40 and Blackberry, it has a strong potential of penetrating to a majority of the smartphone users across the country. Same goes for Japan, where Android and iOS phones are highly dominant.
To download Hike for your respective phones, here all the links you could need Hike: iOS | Android | Windows Phone | S60 | BlackBerry (Beta)