I’ve covered a lot of startup stories on this site, but CREO’s tale genuinely sticks with me. Here was a scrappy Indian team that dared to build their own smartphone OS, got snapped up by a unicorn messaging app, and then watched the whole thing quietly fade away. If you’re wondering who owns CREO today — the short answer is Hike Messenger, but the longer answer is that the brand is effectively dormant. Let me walk you through what happened.
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founders | Sai Srinivas & Shubham Malhotra |
| Headquarters | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India |
| Acquired By | Hike Messenger (2016) |
| Product | CREO Mark 1 (Fuel OS) |
| Status | Brand Discontinued |
Who Owns CREO?
CREO was founded in 2014 by Sai Srinivas and Shubham Malhotra, two engineers who had previously worked together and shared a vision of building an Indian smartphone with a homegrown operating system. Their flagship device, the CREO Mark 1, launched in 2016 running Fuel OS — an Android-based OS with a unique predictive AI called OLOS (Operating Layer on OS). The phone got solid reviews but struggled to gain market share in India’s fiercely competitive segment. In 2016, Hike Messenger — the Indian messaging unicorn backed by Bharti Airtel and SoftBank — acquired CREO, bringing both the team and the technology under its umbrella. Hike’s own trajectory, however, took a sharp turn: by 2021 it had shut down its messaging service, leaving CREO’s brand with no active parent to revive it. The company today exists in name only. For a comparison with another Indian startup brand, see who owns YU Televentures. For more details, you can visit the CREO entry on Wikipedia.
| Entity | Role | Ownership % |
|---|---|---|
| Hike Messenger | Acquirer (2016) | 100% |
| Sai Srinivas | Co-founder (exited) | — |
| Shubham Malhotra | Co-founder (exited) | — |
Key Milestones
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2014 | CREO founded in Bengaluru by Sai Srinivas and Shubham Malhotra |
| 2015 | Raised seed funding; began development of Fuel OS (OLOS AI layer) |
| March 2016 | CREO Mark 1 launched at ₹19,999 — India’s first phone with predictive OS features |
| Mid-2016 | Acquired by Hike Messenger; team absorbed into Hike’s product division |
| 2021 | Hike Messenger shuts down its main app; CREO brand effectively abandoned |
| 2026 | Brand remains registered but no active products or services |
Leadership
Sai Srinivas and Shubham Malhotra led CREO until the Hike acquisition. Post-acquisition, they worked within Hike’s broader product organization under Hike’s founder Kavin Bharti Mittal. Both founders have since moved on to other ventures in India’s tech ecosystem.
My Take on CREO
Every time I write about a discontinued Indian smartphone brand, I feel the same thing: a mix of admiration and sadness. CREO genuinely had something — Fuel OS’s OLOS concept was ahead of its time, predicting what you’d want to do next on your phone before you thought of it yourself. But the smartphone market in 2016 India was brutal. You were competing with Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Motorola on price, and with OnePlus on aspiration. CREO was trying to win on software differentiation, which is the right instinct but incredibly hard to execute when your install base is tiny. The Hike acquisition felt like a lifeline at the time, but Hike itself couldn’t survive the WhatsApp era. CREO’s story is a reminder that great ideas need either deep pockets or perfect timing — and CREO had neither.
