BSB invests $7M in hike

BSB, a joint-venture between Bharti and SoftBank today announced that it $7 million fresh investment in ‘hike', its free messaging app.

‘hike' is a free mobile messaging app that crossed the 5 million users in just four months. This makes ‘hike' one of the fastest growing free mobile apps globally.

Mike Kayamori, director, BSB said "The response for hike has been phenomenal especially in such a competitive market. This new round of investment is an endorsement of the great work put in by our product teams."

Kavin Bharti Mittal, head of Product and Strategy, BSB said "We are thrilled by the phenomenal response we've received over the last couple of months. Crossing such a milestone such a short time, in is no small feat." He further adds "In particular, its great to see that our users love the beautiful user interface and the seamless integration between data messaging and SMS. We're also extremely excited to announce hike 2.0 which brings some amazing new features to our amazing users."

Whats unique about hike is the seamless integration between instant messaging and SMS. This is a very powerful feature especially in a market like India where more than 90 percent of the 900 million strong mobile population is on feature phones.

Keeping in line with its focus on building exciting and innovative features, BSB has introduced a big update to hike called hike 2.0. The update brings with it status updates with moods that lets users post updates about what they are up to or what they are thinking in real-time to their close friends only. Users can curate a 'Circle of Friends' inthe app to whom the update goes out to. This way you can message anyone on your address book yet still share those more personal moments amongst a closer set of friends.

Hike is available globally on iOS, Android, WP, S40 and Blackberry beta and 60% of its user comes from India and the rest global led by Middle East and Europe.