Story of Hike Messenger
Born to billionaire Sunil Mittal and his wife Nyna Mittal, Kavin Bharti Mittal is a very popular Indian entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of the world’s sixth-largest mobile messaging app: Hike Messenger.
His father Sunil Mittal is the founder and chairperson of India’s largest telecom company Bharti Airtel, which has a userbase over 350 million. Hailing from Delhi, Kavin has a twin brother named Shravin and a younger sister named Eiesha.
He obtained a masters degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Management from the Imperial College of London, and there he was a part of the college’s cricket team as well as go-kart. Kavin is an avid follower of Zen Buddhism.
While studying in London, Kavin worked as an intern at McLaren Racing, followed by Google and Goldman Sachs. In 2008, when he was in the final year of his college, he founded an app company called AppSpark, and also in collaboration with movietickets.com, he set up an app called MoviesNow, which was a movie-ticketing application for iOS platforms.
Apple recognized this app as one of the ’10 Essential Movie Goer Apps.’ After this, he went on to set up the Foodster App, which would suggest popular dishes from the menu to the users while they were visiting different restaurants.
It was in the year 2012 on the 12th of December when Kavin founded Hike Messenger. Its initial funding included a sum of $21 million from Bharti Softbank and $65 million from Tiger Global. Other investors included names like Matt Mullenweg, Ruchi Sanghvi, and Adam D’Angelo.
From the year of its official release, within a span of three years, Hike Messenger went on to become one of India’s largest internet companies with a total of over 100 million users, and by the year 2014, Hike Messenger became the most downloaded app, both on Apple’s iOS devices and Google’s Playstore for Android devices.
Hike is slated to start monetization from 2019 onwards and is currently valued at $1.4 billion and is India’s fastest start-up to have reached this milestone despite being a free to use application. Kavin was included in the 2017 Forbes 30 under 30 list.