Hike

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. Insiders traced the drift for years: Glassdoor reviews described a company that kept lurching between bets — messaging, then social, then gaming and NFTs — without ever locking product-market fit, under a founder-driven, top-down culture many called directionless. Reviewers also recounted punishing always-on hours, constant hire-and-fire churn, and sudden layoffs that landed with little warning.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.