Rajesh Rudraradhya Joins Hike Messenger as VP and Head, Engineering

Hike Messenger, India’s only homegrown and fastest growing messaging app, announced that Rajesh Rudraradhya has joined its leadership team as the Vice President and Head of Engineering.

Rajesh will report to Founder and CEO, Kavin Bharti Mittal and will be responsible for helping Hike scale its engineering team and streamlining product development.

Rajesh spent the last 15+ years in the Silicon Valley, working for companies like Digital Equipment Corporation, HP, Google and Motorola. He joins Hike from Motorola where he was most recently the Director and Head of Wearables and Internet-of-Things software. Before that, he led Android Apps and Cloud engineering and was responsible for software experiences on Android’s best smartphones, the Moto X and Moto G series. Over the years, Rajesh spent time working on seven different mobile platforms, launching many new products and software experiences. He led the launch of Moto 360, Android Wear’s first round smartwatch that grew to be the most successful of the Android Wear devices and the #1 in market share. He also played a key role in launching many of the industry’s bestseller devices such as Motorola StarTAC, RAZR, DROID, MING and Moto G. Rajesh has also been an adviser to startups in the Internet-of-Things space.

Speaking on the occasion, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger said, “Rajesh has tremendous depth of experience in mobile having led large engineering teams to build some of the world’s most innovative products. Rajesh understands Hike’s mission to bring India online. His passion to solve consumer problems will enable us to realize our mission and build Hike into a product loved by 100’s of millions of people.”

Equally excited on this new journey. Rajesh Rudraradhya, Vice President and Head, Engineering, Hike Messenger, said, “I can sense the making of a great product when I see one and I believe Hike is in a great position to transform the messaging space in India. The opportunity to connect and serve a billion people is rare and what’s even more exciting is that we want to enable and connect people who will be using the internet for the first time in their lives on a mobile device.”

Rajesh is going to lead a global team and will be based out of Delhi.

Rajesh’s appointment follows other leadership announcements at Hike Messenger in the last 6 months viz. Vidur Vyas as Vice President, Marketing; Hemant Goyal as Vice President, Finance; Gautam Vohra as General Counsel; Sumit Mehra as Studio Head and Vikrant Bhatnagar as Head of Human Resources.