Creo, a smartphone and dongle maker now part of Hike

Hike is a popular messenger app in India and has been able to give a tough competition to popular messengers like WhatsApp, Line and even Facebook Messenger. To keep their product competitive in the market, Hike has acquired Creo to venture into the open-to-developers messenger platforms, just like Facebook Messenger.

Creo was a small startup set up in 2013 and consisted of a 50+ member team. They manufactured various hardware products like smartphones and dongles. They were also responsible for Teewe — an HD TV streaming plugin along with a smartphone by the name of Mark 1 which ran an indigenously developed OS.

“The Creo team will begin work on a developer platform to enable third-party developers to build services on the Hike platform,” said Hike. Hike was interested in buying the company last year, but the deal never finalised. Creo was founded by Sai Srinivas Kiran G, and Shubham Malhotra in December 2013. Sai and Shubham are ex Hikers.

(source)