Exclusive: Hike to launch Public Group in next two months

After introducing new Social features for Groups, Hike Messenger, India's first homegrown messaging platform is planning to launch new Public Group in next two months.

"The one we are building is new Public Group because its hard to discover groups that are around us like any college, and young professionals in some cases so we are building a new feature to help them," Vishwanath Ramarao, CTO, Hike Messenger told Gizbot in an exclusive interaction.

He said, "We are the coolest messenger out there because we are into fun and social segment and we see a lot of traction in that space," he replied when asked about the difference between their app and other messaging apps.

Further adding more to that, the company's top-man also said that they are very different from other apps and stated that Hike is not only a base-messenger app but also a very feature-rich and capable app.

While conversing about the numbers, Mr. Ramarao also noted that 90 percent of the people on thier platform are under 32 years of age and thier target audience has always been young India, college goers, and young professionals.

Meanwhile, the instant messaging platform has added new social features for Groups like Vote, Bill Split, Checklists, Events with Reminders and even Teen Patti.

These features will work in the group with up to 1,000 members.

Hike Messenger app was launched in 2012 and acquired a user-base of over 100 million in January 2016. In August 2016, Hike raised its fourth round of funding of $175 million led by Tencent and Foxconn at a valuation of $1.4 billion, making it the fastest company in India to attain a valuation of $1 billion, having reached the milestone in just 3.7 years.

Investors in Hike include Tencent, Foxconn, Tiger Global, Softbank, and Bharti. Apart from these, some of the top tech veterans from the Silicon Valley have also invested in the company and are advisors.

However, the large section of users spread globally contributes to a major apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger already making the two apps two of the most used messenger apps. Now with Hike coming up with its aggressive features may likely serve as a rich competition for them soon.