Silicon Valley tech giants bet big on Mittal’s Hike Messenger

NEW DELHI: India’s homegrown messaging app Hike Messenger has announced that some of the world’s high profile tech veterans have invested in the company in their personal capacities and are playing advisors to it. These top veterans include:

Adam D’Angelo, Founder and CEO, Quora. D’Angelo previously served as Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, where he oversaw new product development and managed the engineering team. In addition, he guided the site’s architecture and infrastructure and started the company's growth team. Prior to serving as CTO, D’Angelo led the Facebook Platform team and, as an engineer, built the initial infrastructure for news feed and the first generation of the company's advertising targeting and delivery systems. He has invested personally in Instagram, Nextdoor, Asana and Wealthfront.

Aditya Agarwal, Vice President Engineering, Dropbox. Agarwal came to Dropbox via the acquisition of Cove, a company he co-founded that was focused on improving group collaboration and communication. Prior to Cove, Agarwal was the Director of Product Engineering at Facebook where he oversaw the development of core products such as News Feed, Search, Photos, Profile and Applications. Agarwal was one of the first engineers at Facebook.

Ruchi Sanghvi was the Vice President, Operations, Dropbox, where she was responsible for product, recruiting, marketing, communications, and other functions. She came to Dropbox through its acquisition of Cove, a collaboration software company she founded in 2011. Prior to that Sanghvi was the first female engineer at Facebook, and was instrumental in implementing the first versions of key features such as News Feed. In the past, Sanghvi has been awarded the TechFellow award for ‘Engineering Leadership’, included in Fast Company’s ‘Most Creative People in Business’, and featured by BBC as one of five Indian technology pioneers. Sanghvi is an active angel investor and advisor to many technology startups.

Matt Mullenweg, Founder and CEO of Automattic Inc. and Co-Founder of WordPress. As an online social media entrepreneur, Mullenweg gives back to the startup community through his angel investment firm Audrey capital, which has backed over 100 companies since 2008, many of which have been acquired.

Commenting on the investment, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger, said, “It’s great to have the world’s top brains in tech share Hike’s vision; and not just entrust us with their investment, but more importantly, also advise us on our product and strategy. Each of them brings with him/her a core area of expertise, which we at Hike find immensely useful as we aggressively grow in India.”

Hike has seen good growth in India over these last 3 years, having acquired 70 million users and transacting over 30 billion messages per month. Over the last year, Hike has brought on board solid leadership from brands like PepsiCo, Amazon, Unilever, Zynga etc. to power its next phase of growth and has been hiring top global talent.