Once bitten, Mittal scion not twice shy of taking battle to tech giant FB
Kavin Bharti Mittal (pictured) is planning to revive his struggling technology start-up 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 has suffered a string of setbacks. The latest blow came last month when it shut down its signature messaging app — a platform that had grabbed the attention of investors such as Tencent Holdings and Foxconn Technology Group, for taking on Whatsapp in the local market.
That setback, however, doesn’t mean the end of the road for Hike, the 33-yearold son of Bharti Airtel’s billionairechairman Sunil Mittal said in an interview last week. In a bid to rekindle growth, he’s now betting on a Facebooklike 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 will return 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.
In recent years, Mittal has seen more lows with Hike, as the glory of its early years faded. Despite becoming a hit early on thanks to its quirky stickers and a privacy feature that let teenagers hide chats from parents, Hike’s messenger app overtime failed to challenge Whatsapp’s popularity. Another idea of Mittal — a super-app similar to China’s Wechat — also didn’t take off.
Hike saw revenue from operations crash to $5,000 for FY19 — the latest year for which data is available — from $81,000 in FY18, according to researcher Tracxn Technologies.
After scaling up too fast and making some top-level hiring decisions that didn’t work out well, Hike is now more streamlined with just 155 employees. Mittal is focused on bolstering revenue through Hike’s two new platforms.
Vibe is a by-approval-only social networking website that, according to its website, promises to connect users with “the funnest people online. Safely.” More than 300,000 applications have come since the sign-ups opened last month.
Rush is Hike’s new bite-sized gaming platform launched in December and is an online version of gaming arcades with coin-operated game machines typically found in malls and amusement parks.
“With Vibe and Rush, we have completed one big pivot. We are cutting away the old stuff,” Mittal said.
“We’ll start thinking about what it means to be profitable in 2022.”