India’s WhatsApp rival Hike raises $175M led by Tencent at a $1.4B valuation –
Summary
Tencent, the company that pioneered messaging with WeChat, is the big name here, but existing investors Tiger Global, Bharti and SoftBank also took part in the round, which takes Hike to more than $250 million raised to date. With our investment, Hike will be able to leverage our deep domain expertise in the messaging platform space to provide more value to its users in India,” Tencent President Martin Lau said in a prepared statement. Hike announced earlier this year that it has over 100 million registered users (i.e. downloads not necessary active), 90 percent of whom are aged under 30, with 40 billion messages exchanged on the service each month, but Bharti Mittal declined to provide an update on that data. [The investment today] happened as we built a relationship over the past few years.” Tencent is the standout name in the Series D round, but Bharti Mittal also played up the importance of Foxconn, another hugely influential Asian tech company that is looking to lay roots in India. India’s current tech unicorns are in the e-commerce space, and those companies started out to fill a void that existed before Amazon brought its business — and billions of dollars in investment capital — to Indian shores.
