Congratulations, Kik!

November 19, 2014
Foundation Capital

Today Kik announced it’s $38m series C fund raise. Kik has been growing from strength to strength ever since Foundation Capital led their series B in early 2013.

It’s becoming clearer everyday that chat is eclipsing social as the killer app for mobile. If you look at the past year, everyone from Skype or Facebook is either trying to build a homegrown solution or buy an existing one with a big userbase. And what makes this exciting is that we’re only at the beginning of this race.

On a basic level, Kik’s approach is different from other players because its username-based network has an innately strong privacy angle as well as a robust community of users. With chat as the core feature, Kik is building an ecosystem from scratch for mobile natives, which we’ve already seen to be a hugely successful approach in Asia with the likes of WeChat and LINE. The first step of this ecosystem is Kik Promoted Chats, which reimagines advertising for the mobile era and has seen strong early success. We see huge potential, and these are only the early days for Kik. Congratulations, Kik!