Kavin Mittal, founder of Hike logs out

Kavin Mittal has shut down Hike after 13 years of pivots from messaging to gaming. Once home to 40M users, Hike’s journey reflects India’s shifting digital ecosystem, regulatory hurdles, and lessons for startups on global markets, risk, and innovation.

Written by Urvi Malvania

September 14, 2025 06:29 IST

Launched as a youth-focused messaging app that at one point drew 80% of its users from under 25-year-olds, Hike grew through acquisitions such as TinyMogul, Hoppr, Zip Phones, Pulse and Creo. (Image/X)

Kavin Mittal, founder of Hike, announced in a Substack post early Saturday that the company will wind down after a 13-year journey that saw multiple pivots and experiments. “After regrouping with our investors and the team, I’ve made the difficult decision to wind down Hike completely,” he wrote in the note.

Mittal, son of Bharti Airtel founder Sunil Mittal, studied engineering in the UK before returning to India to launch Hike in December 2012.

From Messaging Highs to Gaming Pivots

In his Substack post, Mittal explained that while Hike’s US business had shown promise, the fallout from India’s regulatory clampdown made scaling globally a far more capital-intensive and uncertain exercise.

“We could raise the capital, but the real question is: is it worth it? For the first time in 13 years, my answer is no. Not for me, not for my team, and not for our investors,” he said.

Reflecting on the company’s trajectory, he pointed to both achievements and lessons. He recounted that Hike Messenger had once reached 40 million monthly active users and was ranked as one of India’s most loved consumer brands. When the messaging platform faltered, Mittal pivoted to casual PvP gaming in the form of Rush.

With Rush, he continued, the company built a platform that scaled to 10 million users and generated over $500 million in gross revenue within four years. “Our execution was super, but we could never quite make it stick. There are clear lessons to carry forward, especially on market selection—Be careful with winner-take-all markets. To win, you need to go global. Don’t build for today’s constraints. Build on the spring/summer of new technologies. Regulatory clarity matters. Risk is fine; uncertainty is not,” he wrote.

Even as he drew the curtain on Hike, Mittal stressed that his larger ideas remain intact. He described them as “bold”—centred on new frontiers at the intersection of artificial intelligence, energy breakthroughs, and human self-mastery. In his words, “This chapter ends, but the climb continues.”

Regulatory Roadblocks and Future Vision

Just weeks earlier, Mittal had detailed the company’s decision to shut down operations in India and focus entirely on global markets. In an August post, also on Substack, he noted that the government’s stance on real money gaming (RMG) had left no room for the industry to flourish. With regulatory ambiguity turning into outright bans, he argued that India was no longer viable for building the kind of network business Hike envisioned.

“The Government of India has made its position clear: RMG will not be allowed to exist in the country,” Mittal said, citing GST hikes and rushed legislation as examples of the policy environment.

While disappointed, he also struck a respectful tone, acknowledging the complexity of policymaking and expressing hope that regulatory clarity would improve in future. For Hike, however, the path forward was clear: exit India, and double down on the US and other global markets where retention, monetisation, and regulatory stability were stronger.

The August note linked back to a bigger ambition that Mittal had first articulated in July — the idea of transforming gaming into an “online nation.” In that essay, he argued that traditional corporations were limited in how they created value, while blockchain technology could enable entirely new forms of shared ownership. He envisioned “Company 2.0,” a model where users didn’t just consume products but owned a stake in the networks they helped build.