Hike’s Kavin Mittal loves to compete with both WhatsApp and his billionaire dad

Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder & CEO, Hike, an internet messaging application.

“Everyday I have to delete some apps from my phone,” Kavin Bharti Mittal tells me, holding a low-end Android smartphone bundled with a prepaid Airtel number. Kavin is the CEO of Hike messenger, India’s answer to WhatsApp. He prefers to use a US$100 smartphone like most of Hike’s users, and its memory can’t handle all the apps he tries to test and download each day.

28-year-old Kavin, son of Indian billionaire and Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal, faces another peculiar problem. Every week his prepaid account (subscribed to Bharti-owned Airtel) runs out of its data quota due to heavy internet usage. He deliberately chooses to keep a prepaid SIM card and a low-end smartphone to identify problems faced by India’s 900 million mobile users, out of whom 95 percent are on prepaid plans.

“All my top teams are on similar kinds of plans and phones, mostly on prepaid,” says Kavin, who is building up Hike as a social networking app for the masses in India, especially the youth, almost all of whom love to be on Facebook.

This week, Kavin roped in Silicon Valley biggies like Quora founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and Ruchi Sanghvi, board member at Paytm, as advisors and investors in his four-year-old startup. Flipkart board member and Dropbox vice president Aditya Agarwal also invested in Hike in this round. The amount of funding is undisclosed.

“It’s great to have the world’s top brains in tech share Hike’s vision and not just entrust us with their investment. More importantly, they also advise us on our product and strategy,” says Kavin.

Ironically, apart from Mullenweg, all the other new investors have worked at Facebook, Hike’s biggest rival in India. As per AppAnnie data, WhatsApp and Facebook rank amongst the top five Android apps, while Hike ranks 11th.

“We understand the challenges faced by the billion plus people of India. Messaging is playing a key role in bringing people online in a mobile first market and Hike Messenger has begun to play a pivotal role in that market,” Ruchi explains her rationale for investing in Hike.

A shift in gears for 2016

“In 2012, when we started building Hike, people thought we were crazy. Now, when the internet user base has reached a critical mass and people do their ordinary chores through mobile apps, time has come to partner with several of these services providers and integrate them into Hike in 2016,” said Kavin, when I met him a few weeks ago.

Hike claims to have acquired 70 million users transacting in over 30 billion messages per month. Its bigger rival WhatsApp has about 900 million users in the world, with about 10 percent of its user base in India.

To solve data and storage bottlenecks which a majority of low-end smartphone users in India face, Kavin plans to morph Hike into an all encompassing application where people can buy groceries, book a cab, or order food.

India has about 400 million internet users, out of whom about 300 million access the internet from a mobile device.

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