Hike Takes HikeLand Out Of Early Preview With Ad-free Ludo And Upgraded Home UX The latest addition aims to create more ways for users to hangout online while hanging out offline continues to remain challenging
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Indian AI-led Unicorn startup Hike on Thursday brought the mobile-first virtual world, HikeLand out of early preview with new shared experiences and upgrades across HikeLand Home and HikeMoji.
The platform saw early adoption with time spent on the app at a daily average of 50 minutes. Adding to it, conversation experiences inside HikeLand Home, it introduced ad-free Ludo for users. Adding to this, it also rolled out full-body HikeMoji on the platform along with over 40 localized elements. All this is aimed to keep people stick to the virtual space.
Launched in June 2020, HikeLand was built from the ground up keeping India in mind for a mobile-first audience, and was born out of an idea to reimagining UX (user experience) and go beyond the decade-old user online experiences such as messaging and feed, among others.
"The feedback on HikeLand Early Preview has been fantastic. With over 50 minutes of time spent/day, users love the new user experience and it's clear they just want more. Today, we are following through on that demand. Games have been a huge request and we're excited to launch our version of Ludo on HikeLand built around the HikeMoji where up to 4 players can play while hanging out over a voice call. Ludo on HikeLand will be completely ad-free," said Hike founder and chief executive officer Kavin Bharti Mittal, while speaking on the roll-out of the latest additions on HikeLand.
The New Delhi-based company believes the future of social lies in social niches and is scaling that future through the products it's building.
"Our users have also been chasing us for the full HikeMoji and today we're launching just that with Full Body HikeMoji that comes with its own wardrobe. Hikers will finally be able to be their funnest, most expressive self in HikeLand, and style their HikeMoji in unique ways. In addition to that, we've improved the Home UX so that all of these activities are easier to discover making the experience more engaging," Mittal added.
In August 2016, Hike became the tenth Indian startup to be valued at over $1 billion. The startup has raised over $261 million in capital from top-tier investors such as SoftBank, Tiger Global, Tencent, Foxconn, and Bharti, among others.
