Hike to raise $14 Mn funding, announces hike direct cash transfers to fool around on 1st April

Instant messaging app Hike will be raising another $14 Mn funding round from Bharti SoftBank Holdings, according to ET. “The fresh infusion of funds will be used to scale up Hike and enable it to become agile enough to dominate the instant messaging space,” said a person close to development. Though both Bharti Airtel and BSB has declined to comment on the same.

This will be second round of investment that hike will be raising after an initial $7 Mn funding round which it had raised in April 2013. Hike was launched by Kavin Bharti Mittal, son of Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal in December 2012.

The app has crossed 15 million subscribers.

While it’s April Fool, Hike didn’t missed the chance, and thus announced launch of “direct cash transfers.” The new feature will allow people to transfer money to people using hike which company says is as simple as sending a photo. The news went viral.

Let’s have a look how it played prank so well.!

Upload cash by taking a pic!

One just need to take a pic of cash and upload it to the account or better yet send it to a friend. Hike will automatically detect the amount of cash and transfer it in under a micro-second.

Chat > Attach > Money.

Alternatively, just go to Rewards > Hike Cash Transfers > Add Money

To ensure that cash remains secure and private, it has modeled hikecoins after bitcoins, while removing all the issues that plagued it. While it uses a similar distributed blockchain infrastructure, it has none of the problems that bitcoin has.

It will act as the currency exchange, which it assures will not go down like Mt. Gox does and instead of mining bitcoins, to earn free hikecoins, all one need to do is use hike with friends. Isn’t

Currently beta, hike will be rolling this service slowly to all its users.

Click here to check out a Beta Preview.