Hike
Social/gamingIndia
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $1.4 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
- 🦄Became a unicornAug 2016
- 📈Peak valuation$1.4 Billion ’16
- 💔Became a Unitard2021
- 💸Last valuationWiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$261M
Total raised
$83.2K/day
Burned · 8.6y alive
Funding: Yahoo Finance/Entrackr
Current status
Shut down RMG ops 2025 (gaming ban)
The rise & fall
6 moments · 2012–2025The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
Dec 2012
Dec 2012
Founded by Kavin Bharti Mittal
A homegrown messenger out of the Bharti–SoftBank stable takes on WhatsApp with stickers and privacy features.
Wikipedia
Aug 2016
Aug 2016
The peak: a $1.4B WhatsApp challenger$1.4B
A $175M round backed by Tencent and SoftBank's orbit values the four-year-old app at roughly $1.4B.
TechCrunch
2017–20
2017–20
WhatsApp wins India
Free-falling data prices make WhatsApp ubiquitous; Hike's messenger never finds an answer.
YourStory
2018–22
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2018–22
Insiders traced the drift for years: Glassdoor reviews described a company lurching between messaging, social, gaming and NFT bets without ever locking product-market fit, a founder-driven, top-down culture many reviewers called directionless, punishing always-on hours, and hire-and-fire churn with layoffs that landed with little warning.
Jan 2021
Jan 2021
Messenger shut — joins the Unitard Club 💔
Hike kills its core app, conceding India's chat war to WhatsApp, and bets what's left on real-money gaming with Rush.
YourStory
2025
2025
India bans real-money gaming — the end
The 2025 ban wipes out Rush overnight; Hike shuts its money-gaming operations, the last pivot with nowhere left to pivot.
YourStory
$1.4Bof peak value erased · 9 years
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
Hike was an Indian messaging app that hit a ~$1.4B valuation in 2016 backed by Tencent and SoftBank. Unable to compete with WhatsApp, it shut its messenger in 2021 and pivoted to real-money gaming (Rush); a 2025 Indian ban on real-money gaming later ended the business.
Source: YourStory
