Home-grown messaging service app Hike has posted a loss of ₹217 crore in 2016, almost double of what it posted the previous year. As per a data from Registrar of Companies (RoC), Hike had posted a loss of ₹122 crore in the year ended March 2015.

Meanwhile, Hike’s revenues grew almost more than eight times in 2016 at ₹35 crore against ₹4 crore in the year-ago period. Hike, founded by Kavin Mittal, son of telecom baron Sunil Mittal, also witnessed a spike in its user base in 2016.

The Delhi-based company had in August this year raised around $175 million in funding in Series D led by Chinese internet giant Tencent and manufacturing firm Foxconn. With the latest round of funding, the company is being valued at $1.4 billion thus making it way to the India’s list of tech Unicorns, which has players such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, PayTM, Ola and InMobi.

Hike also has Tiger Global, Bharti and SoftBank as its investors, the parent company of taxi-hailing app Ola and it has raised over $250 million so far to compete with WhatsApp, the US-based messaging app with the largest number of users in the Indian market at 100 million active users.

Hike also claims to have crossed the 100-million-users mark in just three months after crossing 70 million users in October 2015. The company had earlier in a statement said that it has been logging a monthly messaging volume of 40 billion from 20 billion in August 2015.

In a bid to take on the rival WhatsApp, Hike has been working on new features like free voice calling, integrated mobile games, localised stickers, news service and emojis to cater to the young audience. It also has several privacy features such as hide a chat, something which WhatsApp doesn’t have.

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