Hike Brings On Ankur Narang To Lead The Sticker Chat Platform’s Renewed Focus On AI, ML

Hike Brings On Ankur Narang To Lead The Sticker Chat Platform’s Renewed Focus On AI, ML

SUMMARY

An IIT Delhi alumni, Ankur Narang was the AI lead at Yatra Online before joining Hike

AI-driven creation has helped Hike add 60K stickers and with a million weekly active users

Founder and CEO Mittal says Hike is targetting a million stickers by the end of the year

At a time when WhatsApp has over 400 Mn users in India, can other messaging and communication platforms hope to stand a chance in this market? Hike’s Kavin Bharti Mittal certainly thinks so.  The company revamped its Hike Sticker Chat earlier this year with a deeper focus on AI and machine learning to not only help sticker discovery, but also create some stickers on the go. That overhaul has helped Hike add 60K stickers since Sticker Chat was released. And to double down on this front, Hike has brought on board Ankur Narang as VP of AI and data technologies. An IIT Delhi alumni, Narang has over 25 years of technical experience in full stack tech, product design, AI/ML, high-performance computing and he was leading the AI team at Yatra Online in his former role.We are building in a way where we focus on the four, five or six close relationships that you have. And it’s very hard for a mass market platform to focus on the depth of the relationship of close friends.

Last month, Hike announced that Sticker Chat has crossed a big milestone — 1 Mn weekly active users — and Mittal told Inc42 earlier this week that pivoting from a super app and unbundling the Hike platform to offer chat as a standalone experience was a risk. He believes that the traction is solely down to how Hike used machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve its problem of having stickers in multiple languages, colours and versions. Mittal attributed the success of the AI implementation in the platform to the company’s focus on talent acquisition.

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