NEW DELHI– Hike messenger, India’s first homegrown messaging app, on Tuesday announced that tech veterans from Silicon Valley have invested in the company and are playing advisors to it.
These top veterans include Adam D’Angelo, founder and CEO of Quora — a US-based question-and-answer website; Aditya Agarwal, vice president, engineering, of Dropbox — file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc.; Ruchi Sanghvi, former vice president, operations at the Dropbox; and Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic Inc. and co-founder of WordPress publishing platforms.
“It is great to have the world’s top brains in tech share hike’s vision; and not just entrust us with their investment, but more importantly, also advise us on our product and strategy,” Kavin Bharti Mittal, founder and CEO of hike messenger, said in a statement.
D’Angelo previously served as chief technology officer at Facebook, where he oversaw new product development and managed the engineering team.
Prior to that, he led the Facebook Platform team and, as an engineer, built the initial infrastructure for news feed.
Agarwal, one of the first engineers at Facebook, came to Dropbox via the acquisition of Cove, a company he co-founded that was focused on improving group collaboration and communication.
Sanghvi was responsible for product, recruiting, marketing, communications, and other functions at Dropbox.
The first female engineer at Facebook, Sanghvi has been awarded the TechFellow award for ‘Engineering Leadership’ and featured by BBC as one of five Indian technology pioneers.
“It’s quite clear that messaging is playing a key role in bringing people online in a mobile first market like India and hike messenger has begun to play a pivotal role in that market. We are both aligned to hike’s vision and are excited about what comes next,” Sanghvi and Agarwal said.
An online social media entrepreneur, Mullenweg, supports the startup community through his angel investment firm Audrey capital, which has backed over 100 companies since 2008, many of which have been acquired.
“I believe in hike messenger’s vision and I can see the team gearing up and are well positioned for aggressive growth in the country,” he noted.
“Each of the them brings with him/her a core area of expertise, which we at hike find immensely useful as we aggressively grow in India,” Mittal added.
