Kavin Bharti Mittal is the Founder and CEO of Hike Messenger. With over 100 million registered users exchanging over 40 billion messages per month, Hike is the only successful Indian messaging platform with such scale. In August 2016, Hike became the 10th Indian company to receive a valuation of over USD 1 billion. It also became the fastest company in India to attain a Unicorn status, having reached the milestone in just 3.7 years. With this milestone, Kavin also became the “youngest Indian to create a $1B+ company in India (28 at the time)”. Along the way, Kavin has raised over USD 250 million in capital from top tier investors such as Tencent, Foxconn, Tiger Global, SoftBank, Bharti and some of Silicon Valley’s top tech veterans.

Kavin launched Hike in December 2012 with the simple idea that in a mobile first market like India, where the first screen for most would be a mobile device, one could bring India online through messaging. Hike today, as a result, is a new kind of messaging app that not only simplifies how people connect with one another, but is also changing the way they interact with content and services on mobile. As someone whose passion lies in creating top class teams and building products for mobile first Indians, Kavin believes that messaging will do for mobile, what the browser did for the desktop times a 100.

Kavin completed his Masters in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Management (M.Eng.) from Imperial College, London. During his summer breaks at college, he interned at some of the world’s leading companies such as McLaren Racing, Google and Goldman Sachs.

Awards and Recognitions
- Entrepreneur India 35 Under 35, 2017
- Forbes’ Asia 30 Under 30, Class of 2017
- ET and Spencer Stuart 40 under 40 (2016)
- ET Panache Trendsetting CEO (2016)
- Express IT Awards (Newsmaker of the Year 2016)