OYO Raises $90M from SoftBank and Hike Messenger Secures $175M Led by Tencent & Foxconn

Budget hotel aggregator Oyo, owned by Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd, is closing a $90 million financing round, while Hike Messenger, India’s only homegrown messaging platform, announced that it has raised a Series D financing of over $175 million in a new funding round.

Budget Hotel Aggregator Oyo Raises $90M from SoftBank

Budget hotel aggregator Oyo, owned by Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd, is closing a $90 million financing round, split into two tranches, led by its largest shareholder SoftBank Corp, as reported by TOI. The company has already received $61 million with the rest of the money slated to come in soon. The second tranche of this funding will be a mix of equity and debt, will also largely pumped in by existing investors led by SoftBank. Oyo is picking up $5 million in debt financing from InnoVen Capital. The budget hotel aggregator's valuation has remained flat at around $400 million, pre-money. Its other investors include Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others.

Hike Messenger Secures $175M in Series D Round Led by Tencent & Foxconn

Hike Messenger, India’s only homegrown messaging platform and the largest Indian internet company by users, announced that it has raised a Series D financing of over $175 million in a new funding round led by Tencent Holdings Limited and Foxconn Technology Group valuing the company close to $1.4 billion. Existing investors Tiger, Bharti and the SoftBank Group also participated in this round. This is the fourth venture capital round and the biggest to date for Hike, taking the total investment to over $250 million so far.

Hike also has a roster of some of the most prominent people in the technology space as angel investors such as Adam D’Angelo, Founder and CEO, Quora; Aditya Agarwal, Vice President Engineering, Dropbox; Ruchi Sanghvi, erstwhile Vice President, Operations, Dropbox and Matt Mullenweg, Founder and CEO of Automattic Inc. and Co-Founder, WordPress.

In January 2016, Hike had announced that it has a user base of a 100 million users. 95% of Hike users are based in India and 90% of them are young and below the age of 30. Hike users, on an average, exchange 40 Billion messages per month and spend 120 min. per user per week on the platform.