Update: Hike CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal has officially confirmed this investment. He also claimed that Hike has now crossed 35 million registered users with over 50% active every month. Around 90% users are from India of which over 80% of users are below 25 years. This essentially means that Hike has at least 17.5 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally and around 16 million MAUs in India, as per our calculations. Earlier this week, WhatsApp had claimed to have close to 65 million monthly active users in India. The company mentions that it is also handling over 10 billion messages per month including over 3 billion stickers. It is also apparently adding 300,000 registered users on a daily basis. Earlier (Aug 26): Hike a mobile messaging application incubated by Bharti Softbank (BSB), has raised $65 million from Tiger Global, with participation from BSB, reports the Economic Times, citing sources. MediaNama contacted Kavin Bharti Mittal, CEO of Hike, for confirmation, but haven't received a response yet. ET reports that BSB had invested $20 million into the company so far. Hike has features unique to it, such as a Hidden mode which allows users to hide private chats, and make them accessible only via a password, apart from last-seen privacy (countering a Whatsapp feature that allows people to see when someone has been online last), and big file transfers of up to 100 MB. As of June 2014, Hike had crossed the 20 million registered users mark, adding 5 million users in 3 months. In…
