Hike Messenger has acqui-hired Bangalore-based technology startup Creo, a company statement said.
Creo, the maker of HDMI media streaming device Teewe, was founded by Sai Srinivas Kiran G and Shubham Malhotra in November 2013. Prior to starting up, both founders worked at Bharti SoftBank, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Corp.
The Creo team constitutes over 50 members, while Hike currently has over 300 employees spread across offices in Delhi and Bangalore.
The Creo team will develop a platform so that third-party developers can build services on the Hike platform, a spokesperson from the messaging services firm said in the statement.
In January 2016, Creo secured $3 million from Sequoia Capital, Beenext Ventures and India Quotient. In March 2015, it secured $1.7 million (Rs 11 crore) from Sequoia and India Quotient. The company’s HDMI device Teewe was seen as the Indian counterpart to Google’s Chromecast.
Hike Messenger, founded in 2012 by Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal’s son Kavin Bharti Mittal.
In order to gain early-mover advantage over rival WhatsApp and Chinese competitor WeChat, Hike in June this year launched an in-app payment wallet. It allows bank-to-bank money transfer via unified payments interface and also permits those who don’t actively use a bank account to send and receive money from their friends.
In February this year, Hike acquired InstaLively Livestreaming Pvt. Ltd-owned social networking app Pulse. As part of the deal, the startup founders joined Hike.
In August 2016, Tencent had led a $175-million funding round in Hike, along with Foxconn. Tiger Global, Softbank and Bharti have also invested in the messaging app.
