Bharti Airtel promoter group family’s Kavin Bharti Mittal, son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, announced in a social media post that he, along with the team and investors, has decided to ‘wind down’ Hike’s operations completely after India’s new ban on real-money games.

In a LinkedIn post, Kavin Bharti Mittal explained how nine months ago, the company had launched its operations in the United States, but after India’s recent ban, the company will have to carry out a “full recap.”

Mittal said that this ‘reset’ in the operations will be the best use of their time and money.

“After regrouping with our investors and the team, I’ve made the difficult decision to wind down Hike completely,” he said. “A reset that is not the best use of capital or time.”

The Online Gaming Act, which was passed in August 2025, prohibits all online games involving monetary transactions.

Mittal on India’s real money games ban

In an earlier newsletter for his readers, Kavin Bharti Mittal expressed his ‘disappointment’ on behalf of the entrepreneurs, developers, and teams across the nation for investing ‘billions of dollars of investment’ in the sector.

The newsletter, which was released on 21 August 2025, also mentioned that even though Mittal was disappointed, he understands the government’s decision for the society at large.

“We understand and respect the government’s decision to take a moral stance on what it believes to be right for society. Policy-making is complex, and democracies often involve hard trade-offs,” said Mittal.

This announcement also declared that the company is winding up its India operations and going big towards the US market. However, on 13 September 2025, Mittal announced the team and investors’ decision to ‘wind down Hike completely.’

Hike’s real money game business

Hike aimed to build a gaming economy where players are able to play and earn in order to grow in the networks they create, according to the company’s LinkedIn data.

In August 2021, Hike raised capital from marquee investors like Tinder’s Justin Mateen, Cred’s Kunal Shah, SoftBank Vision Fund, Binny Bansal (co-founder of Flipkart), Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl, among others.

With 110 employees, the company worked remotely, spread across 30 cities in India. Hike, which originally started out as just a messaging application, was shut down in 2021.

After this shutdown, the company started to work on a real-money game business called ‘Rush’. This business featured 14 money-based mobile games for users to play, enabling them with Web3 technologies and a play-to-earn business model.

“With Rush, we built a new kind of Casual PvP gaming platform and scaled it to 10M users and $500M+ in gross revenue (CEA) in just 4 years,” said Mittal in his recent LinkedIn post.

Announcing the final shutdown, Mittal said that his learnings from this experience are ‘invaluable’ and that this is a chapter end for him, but he is looking forward to the ‘climb’ which lies ahead.

“This is both a disappointment and a hard outcome. But I choose to look on the bright side: the learnings are invaluable, and my conviction for what’s next is even stronger,” said Mittal.