Hike Messenger is expected to receive $14 million in funding from Bharti Softbank, reports The Economic Times. The company, which crossed 15 million subscribers mark recently, is expected to use this funding to scale up its operations. This is the second round of investments by the company, which received $7 million in April 2013. Note that this development is unconfirmed. Hike competes in a tough market that is dominated by WhatsApp, which was recently acquired by Facebook for $19 billion. Hike had said earlier that 90% of its users are from India, and the split between users across telecom operators “reflects the market share of telcos”. Bharti Softbank works closely with mobile operators, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, to help them protect some revenue from the SMS communication channel by launching apps that combine data and SMS. Oximity raises seed funding Oximity, a global online media startup for user-generated news, has received $620,000 in seed funding from Ronnie Screwvala, Sashi Reddi, Krishnan Ganesh and Anand Ranganathan, reports The Hindu. According to the report Sashi Reddi had also invested $165,000 in the company last year. Co-founded by former Wall Street banker Sanjay Goel and German IT entrepreneur Christian Hapke, US-based Oximity connects news sources directly to the readers in over 180 languages globally. The website has more than 2,500 writers generating 700 news stories daily, that is read by people from 200 countries. Oximity helps in monetizing their content while charging users on a 'freemium' model — free basic services and top up charges for the…
