HOOKED is a mobile entertainment company that pioneered "chat fiction" - bite-sized stories told as text-message conversations between characters, designed to be read in about five minutes. Built by husband-and-wife founders Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia under the company Telepathic Inc., the app turned suspense and horror into thumb-tapping cliffhangers and reached tens of millions of mostly teen and young-adult readers, repeatedly topping the App Store charts in dozens of countries.
Prerna Gupta is the founder and CEO of Hooked, the chat-fiction app that turned bite-sized text-message stories into a habit for over 100 million Gen Z readers and topped the App Store in 25 countries. A Stanford economics grad who once ran consulting decks before building apps, she co-created the music hits LaDiDa and Songify under her startup Khush (acquired by Smule, where she became Chief Product Officer) before reinventing fiction for the smartphone generation. She describes Hooked as 'books for the Snapchat generation' and her own role as a product CEO who would rather build with her team than work a room.