Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Company overview. Hike Ltd. is the Indian entity behind Hike Messenger and later the Rush gaming platform. It was founded in December 2012 by Kavin Bharti Mittal, son of Bharti Airtel founder Sunil Bharti Mittal, and is headquartered in the Delhi area. Hike is privately held, backed by Bharti Enterprises/Bharti SoftBank, Tiger Global, Tencent and Foxconn; it raised roughly $261 million and reached a $1.4 billion valuation in 2016. Related corporate entities include Hike Private Ltd. (India) and Hike Global Pte Ltd (Singapore). The company announced it was winding down completely in September 2025; no reliable public employee count is available.
Products / services. Originally a youth-focused instant-messaging app competing with WhatsApp, Hike Messenger reached 40 million-plus monthly active users and was shut down in 2021. The company also launched an in-app UPI payment wallet with Yes Bank. After 2021 it pivoted to mobile gaming, most prominently Rush, a real-money casual PvP platform offering carrom and ludo for cash prizes, plus the Vibe community app and Web3/blockchain experiments. Rush reported about 10 million users and over $500 million in gross revenue across four years. India's Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, which banned real-money gaming, prompted the shutdown.
Patent-litigation posture. Hike is an operating company, not an NPE: the tracked docket shows one case, with Hike as defendant (0 as plaintiff). The suit, Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Hike Ltd., was filed in the Eastern District of Texas — a plaintiff-friendly venue — by Uniloc, a well-known patent assertion entity that acquired and asserted portfolios. Public dockets (Stanford NPE Litigation Database, Unified Patents) also record related Uniloc filings against Hike entities in 2018 (e.g., 2:18-cv-00417 and 2:18-cv-00515, E.D. Tex.) over U.S. Patent 7,020,252, directed to group voice messaging.
Context. Both the 2017 and 2018 Uniloc actions were assigned to Judge Rodney Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas, and the '252 patent was also asserted by Uniloc against Microsoft and Apple. Note that the authoritative case list above contains only one tracked Hike appearance; the additional 2018 suits come from external public records and are cited here as context, not as database entries.