Mittal Jr bets on Hike

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Hyderabad: It would have been quite easy for the son of one of the top ranking entrepreneurs in India to take up a plum board seat. But not for Kavin Bharti Mittal, who would like tread the same path as his father Sunil Bharti Mittal — the Indian telecom czar, who built the multinational group through his own enterprise. “I always wanted to build something from scratch,” said Kavin, who began his entrepreneur pursuits at the age of 20.
Under his start-up firm AppSpark, Kavin developed apps such as ‘Movies Now’ in 2009 and ‘Foodster’ in 2010. His milestone event was setting up of Hike, a free cross-platform messaging app, by Bharti Softbank Holdings Pte Ltd (BSB) — a joint venture of Bharti Enterprise and Japan-based Softbank Corp to mobile Internet services. BSB uses mobile-first strategy as most people are getting introduced to Internet through mobile.
“The Internet space has always interested me. India is the second largest mobile market in the world and has one of the largest young population that wants to stay connected.
This gives us a unique opportunity to build services around mobile. Hike is designed to address this opportunity,” said Kavin, who is  back from the United States to tap growth opportunities in a growing market like India.
Elaborating on India, he  says, “I believe that India is at a cusp. Today, our country is where the US was in 1995-96, and where China was in 2003. This allows entrepreneurs to harness the opportunities and that is why I came back to India and has set up BSB.”
Speaking about his plans for Hike, Mittal junior said that the BSB messaging platform addresses one of prime issues that other messengers don’t focus on — how could one communicate with the other person, if he or she is offline.
“We have solved this issue by delivering message to the person, who is offline, through SMS. The receiver can reply back to the message through SMS, which will be delivered to the orginal sender on Hike, making messaging extremely seamless. No other messenger has this feature.”
The other unique feature, he claims, is walkie-talkie, that allows users to have free voice-based chat. “We have also handcrafted fun and expressive stickers that we believe will add a lot more character to messaging among the youth.”