Startup Deep Dive : Hike — the messaging unicorn that shut down twice

Hike raised $261 million across seven rounds, touched a $1.4 billion valuation, and signed up more than 100 million registered users at its peak, as per Tracxn’s funding record and TechCrunch’s 2016 report on its Tencent-led round. Yet on 13 September 2025, founder Kavin Bharti Mittal shut the company down completely, not once but for the second time in five years, closing a chapter that ran from India’s most-funded messaging app to a real-money gaming business killed by an act of parliament.

The two shutdowns bookend a story that is less about one bad call and more about a founder who kept finding a new mountain to climb after the network effects of the old one buried him. Hike Messenger gave up on messaging in January 2021 after WhatsApp’s dominance proved unbreakable. Its successor, Rush Gaming Universe, built a business that Mittal says generated more than $500 million in gross revenue in India in four years, only to be switched off in September 2025 when the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act banned real-money gaming outright. This piece traces both falls, with the numbers on each side.

Quick facts

What they do

Hike was two different companies wearing one name. From December 2012 to January 2021, it was Hike Messenger, an SMS-and-app-based chat product built for Indian phones that could not always afford a WhatsApp-sized data plan, sold to first-time internet users through free SMS credits, stickers and, later, a digital wallet. From January 2021 until September 2025, the same corporate entity, Hike Private Limited, ran Rush Gaming Universe, a mobile platform for skill-based and real-money games such as rummy and fantasy formats, alongside Vibe, a smaller social video-watching app. Both eras served the same customer at heart: a mobile-first Indian user Mittal believed global platforms were mispricing or ignoring, first for chat, later for a five-minute game between commutes.

The origin

Kavin Bharti Mittal, the son of Bharti Airtel founder Sunil Mittal, studied electronics and electrical engineering at the University of York and then took a master’s at Imperial College London, interning at McLaren Racing, Google and Goldman Sachs along the way, according to his Wikipedia biography and contemporaneous profiles. He returned to India with a simple bet: the country’s next hundred million internet users would meet the internet on a basic phone, over patchy and expensive data, and an SMS-native chat app that felt as fun as it was cheap could win them before WhatsApp did. Hike launched in December 2012 with unlimited free SMS funded by in-app credits, a feature it called Hike Offline, aimed squarely at users for whom data connectivity was still unreliable. The idea worked well enough, well enough that Hike crossed 5 million users within three months of launch and 20 million by mid-2014, pulling in Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Group as its first two backers.

The struggle years

The cracks showed early, and they showed in the accounts, not just the user charts. By the year ending March 2018, Hike’s messaging business was losing money at a pace that had nothing to do with scale: its loss widened 87.8% to ₹399.58 crore even as revenue was still only ₹39.64 crore, and Moneylife’s reporting on the filing noted that the bulk of that revenue came not from the product but from redemption of the company’s own mutual fund investments, meaning the app itself was barely monetising the users it had. Two pivots followed in quick succession, each an attempt to find a business model where the product had found none. In January 2018, Hike launched “Hike Total” and a broader super-app ambition bundling payments, games and a timeline feed onto the chat spine; by January 2019, it had reversed course and stripped the app back down to a leaner messaging product, an admission that the super-app bet had not paid off. By the year ending March 2020, operating revenue had collapsed to a nominal ₹13,000 against expenses of ₹193 crore, and cumulative losses since inception had reached ₹1,539.5 crore, per Entrackr’s report on the FY20 filing. The company was, by its own numbers, running a nine-figure annual loss on a product that had stopped generating anything a filing could meaningfully call revenue.

The turning point

The turning point was not a single funding round; it was the decision to stop. On 6 January 2021, Mittal announced on social media that Hike’s Sticker Chat messaging app would shut down for good, with users given until 14 January 2021 to migrate their data, as reported by TechCrunch and Deccan Chronicle. On one side of that date sat a company that had touched a $1.4 billion valuation in 2016 and claimed over 100 million registered users at its peak; on the other sat a business with essentially no operating revenue left to defend and an admission, in Mittal’s own words reported by Storyboard18 in 2025, that “global network effects are too strong” for an Indian challenger to out-compete WhatsApp without the state banning foreign apps outright, which India never did. Rather than wind the company down, Mittal chose to keep the corporate shell, the cap table and roughly the same team, and rebuild around two new products carved out of Hike’s old codebase: Vibe, a social video app, and Rush, a gaming platform. It amounted to relaunching the company from a standing start on revenue while carrying forward more than a decade of accumulated losses.

The money behind it

Hike raised money in two distinct eras: a messaging-era cap table built by Indian and Asian strategics, and a smaller, undisclosed gaming-era top-up from Web3-focused funds. Across its life it drew $261 million over seven rounds, according to Tracxn’s funding record.

• April 2013 and March 2014: $7 million and then $14 million from Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Group, the joint venture that seeded the company (Wikipedia, citing contemporaneous funding reports).
• August 2014: $65 million led by Tiger Global, at a reported 35 million users, bringing Tiger Global onto the cap table as the first pure financial investor of scale.
• August 2016: $175 million Series D led by Tencent Holdings and Foxconn Technology Group, with SoftBank, Bharti and Tiger Global all participating, valuing Hike at $1.4 billion and taking cumulative funding past $250 million (TechCrunch, Medianama, August 2016). Tencent’s entry gave Hike access to sticker and gaming know-how from a company that had built exactly that playbook in China.
• 2022: Undisclosed rounds from Polygon and, in May 2022, from Jump Crypto, Tribe Capital and Republic, aimed at the Web3-inflected Rush build-out, taking total disclosed funding to $261 million (Tracxn).

By the time it shut down in September 2025, Mittal said the company was sitting on roughly $4 million of remaining capital, earmarked for vendor payments and employee severance with any balance returned to investors, as reported by IndianStartupNews’s account of his shutdown post.

How it makes money

The messaging-era business, by its own filings, never really worked out how to make money: its FY18 revenue was mostly investment redemptions, not user monetisation, and by FY20 operating revenue had shrunk to four figures. The gaming-era business under Rush had an actual model, and it is the one worth explaining, because it is also the one a change in tax law could break in a single quarter.

• Entry-fee commission: Rush took a cut of the entry fee players paid into skill-based cash games such as rummy and fantasy formats, the platform fee model common to Indian real-money gaming (Entrackr, December 2022, on Hike’s FY22 filing).
• Commission on winnings: a further cut was taken from the prize pool paid out to winners.
• Membership and VIP fees: a subscription-style layer charged frequent players for tiered access.
• The part people get wrong: gross transaction value, the total money players put into games, is not revenue; Rush’s own claimed figure of roughly ₹2,500 crore in annualised gross revenue two years into the pivot (company-stated, reported by Deccan Herald) sat far above the ₹150 crore of operating revenue Hike actually booked in FY23, because only the commission slice, not the pooled stakes, ever reached the company’s books.
• Where the margin sat, and didn’t: in FY23, Hike spent roughly ₹1.99 for every ₹1 of operating revenue it earned, and marketing alone, at ₹142.65 crore, cost nearly as much as total revenue, per Entrackr’s analysis of the filing; the model only worked if customer-acquisition spending could eventually be cut back once players stuck around, which the September 2025 ban never gave the company the chance to test.

The numbers

Hike’s filings show a company that essentially reset its revenue base in 2021 and then rebuilt it from zero through Rush, without ever approaching the scale of its cumulative losses.

Figures are Entrackr’s reporting of Hike Private Limited’s RoC filings (March 2021, December 2022 and February 2024 reports). Cumulative losses, which include the pre-2020 messaging-era burn, stood at ₹1,539.5 crore at the end of FY20, ₹1,775 crore at the end of FY22 and ₹1,923 crore at the end of FY23, per the same Entrackr filings analysis; no FY24 or FY25 filing had been reported by Entrackr, Inc42 or TheKredible at the time of writing, so those two years are omitted rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Rush Gaming Universe, essentially all of it: by FY22 and FY23, Hike’s operating revenue “generates revenue via its online gaming platform named Rush by Hike,” per Entrackr’s description of the FY22 filing, with messaging contributing nothing and Vibe not separately monetised in the filings reviewed.
• Geography, before the pivot away from India: Rush ran as an India-first product for its first roughly four years, with Mittal telling staff in September 2025 that the platform had over 5 million players and had distributed $480 million in winnings domestically, before the company tried to pivot the model overseas.
• The late, small US bet: Hike launched a US business roughly nine months before the September 2025 shutdown; Mittal called it “off to a strong start,” but it was neither large enough nor mature enough to replace the India revenue the RMG ban erased overnight, and it closed along with everything else.
• The surprise: a company remembered for a messaging app that once had more than 100 million registered users ended its life earning every rupee of real revenue from a gaming product almost nobody associated with the Hike brand a decade earlier.

The risks

• Single-country regulatory concentration: Rush’s entire revenue engine ran on India’s tolerance of real-money gaming; the mechanism that killed it was direct, a 28% GST on the full face value of entry fees from October 2023, which Mittal called “a bazooka pointed at us” and which triggered a 22% workforce cut at Rush within weeks (Entrackr and Inc42, August 2023), followed by the outright national ban under the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, which took the whole India business to zero in 2025.
• Network-effect exposure in the first business: Hike Messenger’s core risk, borne out over eight years, was that a chat app’s value depends on which of your contacts are already on it; once WhatsApp cleared a critical mass in India, Hike’s superior stickers or cheaper data could not out-run a network its rival already owned, a mechanism Mittal himself named when he said “global network effects are too strong” for a homegrown challenger.
• Cash-burn-to-revenue mismatch: across both businesses, Hike’s own filings show it routinely spent more than one rupee, and in FY20 spent roughly ₹1,48,461 (per Entrackr’s per-rupee analysis), to generate one rupee of revenue; that ratio improved sharply under Rush but the FY23 filing still showed spend of nearly ₹2 for every ₹1 earned, leaving the business dependent on further funding rounds that a shrinking, more regulated market made harder to close.

The takeaway

Hike’s real lesson is not that it built a bad product; both the messaging app at its peak and Rush at its peak were, by user and revenue numbers, genuine successes for a period. The lesson is that a business built entirely inside one regulator’s tolerance, whether that regulator is a dominant network owner like WhatsApp’s parent or India’s tax and gaming authorities, is renting its future, not owning it. Mittal rebuilt Hike once, from a dead messaging app into a ₹150-crore-revenue gaming company in two years. He chose not to rebuild it a second time after the 2025 ban, telling his team that raising more capital was possible but that pivoting again was, in his words, not “worth it.” A founder who pivots once shows resilience; a founder who declines to pivot twice, in the same breath, is telling you something about how thin the ground had become.

Frequently asked questions

What was Hike Messenger and when did it shut down?

Hike Messenger was an Indian instant-messaging app founded by Kavin Bharti Mittal in December 2012 that competed directly with WhatsApp. Its founder announced the shutdown of the messaging service on 6 January 2021, with the app withdrawn from users by 14 January 2021, per TechCrunch’s reporting at the time.

Was Hike ever profitable?

No filing reviewed for this piece shows Hike Private Limited posting a profit. It ran losses through its messaging years, including a ₹399.58 crore loss in FY18 on ₹39.64 crore of revenue, and continued to lose money through its gaming years, including a ₹147.3 crore loss in FY23 on ₹152 crore of revenue, per Moneylife’s and Entrackr’s reporting of successive RoC filings.

How much money did Hike raise in total, and who backed it?

Hike raised $261 million across seven rounds over its lifetime, per Tracxn’s funding record, from backers including Bharti Enterprises, SoftBank Group, Tiger Global, Tencent, Foxconn, and later Web3-focused funds Polygon, Jump Crypto and Tribe Capital.

Is Hike still a unicorn?

No. Hike’s $1.4 billion valuation dates to its August 2016 funding round, per TechCrunch and Medianama’s reporting at the time; the company never raised at a disclosed higher valuation afterward and shut down entirely in September 2025, so that 2016 mark stands as its last known valuation, not a current one.

Why did Hike shut down completely in 2025, after already surviving the 2021 messaging shutdown?

Hike had rebuilt itself around Rush, a real-money gaming platform, after 2021. India’s Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, banned real-money gaming nationally, eliminating the business’s India revenue base; founder Kavin Bharti Mittal said scaling the company’s nascent international business instead would require a full recapitalisation he judged not worth pursuing, and announced a complete, global shutdown on 13 September 2025, per TechCrunch and his own Substack post as reported by IndianStartupNews.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, “India’s WhatsApp rival Hike raises $175M led by Tencent at a $1.4B valuation,” August 2016
• Medianama, “Tencent, Foxconn invest $175M in Hike Messenger valuing it $1.4B,” August 2016
• TechCrunch, “Tencent-backed Hike, once India’s answer to WhatsApp, has given up on messaging,” January 2021
• TechCrunch, “Hike, once a unicorn, shuts down as India cracks down on real-money gaming,” September 2025
• Entrackr, “Hike posts Rs 13,000 in operating revenue with expense of Rs 193 Cr in FY20,” March 2021
• Entrackr, “Hike posts Rs 19 Cr revenue in FY22, outstanding losses mounts to Rs 1,775 Cr,” December 2022
• Entrackr, “Hike’s revenue soars 8X to Rs 150 Cr in FY23; losses up 24%,” February 2024
• Entrackr, “Hike Rush Gaming Universe lays off 22% of workforce,” August 2023
• Inc42, “28% GST Shakes Hike’s Boat: Gaming Startup Trims 22% Workforce,” August 2023
• Moneylife, “Hike suffers a loss of Rs400 crore; It’s Rs39.6 Crore Revenue Mostly from Sale of Mutual Fund Investment,” on the FY18 filing
• Deccan Herald, “Online gaming firms see revenue fall, layoffs since GST hike,” report citing Rush’s annualised gross revenue claim
• Storyboard18, “Kavin Bharti Mittal reflects on Hike’s shutdown: ‘Network effect too strong, India tough market for messaging apps’,” September 2025
• Storyboard18, “‘Risk is fine; uncertainty is not’: Kavin Mittal shares lessons as Hike shuts after 13 years,” September 2025
• Deccan Chronicle, “Kavin Bharti Mittal Shuts Down Hike After 13 Years,” September 2025
• IndianStartupNews, “Kavin Bharti Mittal announces the complete shutdown of Hike; says, ‘Closing a chapter, opening a new one’,” September 2025
• Tracxn, Hike company funding profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, Hike financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Hike Messenger” and “Kavin Bharti Mittal,” accessed September 2026, for founding date and biographical detail

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