Kavin Bharti Mittal is shutting down its rush platform running under the hike banner. He has taken this decision after the government banned the real -time gaming (RMG). Kavin is the son of Sunil Mittal, founder of Bharati Airtel, the country’s largest telecom. Earlier, Kavin had told about the plan to leave India to focus on international markets like America, UK and Australia. Regarding the closure of the hike, Kavin has posted a post on the newsletter platform substack.
There were about 100 employees in Rush
Kavin bharti mittal “After interacting with the investors and the team, I have made a difficult decision to completely close the hike,” said in the post. He has also said in the post that our American business launched just 9 months ago has been strong. However, after the real money gaming is banned in India, the focus on the expansion of international business will have to be increased. There were about 100 employees in Rush. Kavin Mittal had told Moneycontrol last month that Rush’s employees used to see international operations as part of ‘Swat’ teams.
Hike started in 2016
Swat means a team in the business world, which is small, quite skilled and agile. It resolves difficult problems soon. Hike started in 2016 as a messaging app. It was then competed with a messaging app like WhatsApp. Before being closed in January 2021, the number of its monthly active users had reached 4 crores before it was closed. The company then started the RMG platform called Rush. There were 14 mobile games on this. The platform used the web 3 technologies under which users used to get ownership under Play-to-Ane Mechanics.
Government enacted laws to ban RMG
The government passed a bill to ban real money online gaming in the monsoon session of Parliament. After this, all kinds of real money gaming platforms have been banned. The government believes that RMG was suffering losses. Especially its addiction was increasing among the youth. However, real money gaming companies have suffered a lot due to this decision of the government.
Investments of many big investors in hike
Companies like Soft Bank, Tensent, Tiger Global, Bharti, Foxconn, Jump Crypto have invested in the hike. Last month, Mittal had said that the number of users of Rush had increased to 1 crore. Its revenue in India has been more than $ 50 million in four years.