LightFury Games, the Bengaluru-based AAA gaming studio behind the upcoming cricket title eCricket, has closed an $11 million pre-Series A round — with a cap table that doubles as a cricket all-stars list. The round was led by Blume Ventures, V3 Ventures, Japanese gaming major MIXI, and Times Internet, with cricketers including MS Dhoni, Jasprit Bumrah, Hardik Pandya, Shreyas Iyer, Ravindra Jadeja, Tilak Varma, and Sai Sudharsan joining as strategic investors.
The announcement brings LightFury’s total funding to $19.5 million, less than two years after the studio was founded. The company had previously raised $8.5 million in a seed round in April 2024, led by Blume Ventures, with participation from MIXI and Gemba Capital. The pre-Series A capital will go toward completing development of eCricket and building out its live operations infrastructure — the post-launch content pipeline that sustains engagement and monetisation in free-to-play titles.
By signing a global player roster licence covering over 600 professional cricketers — including international names like Chris Gayle, Ben Stokes, Pat Cummins, and Andre Russell alongside the Indian investor-athletes — LightFury is building both the IP rights and the community credibility that cricket games have historically struggled to secure. The decision to bring in active players as equity stakeholders, rather than paid brand ambassadors, signals a distribution strategy as much as a funding one.
LightFury was founded in 2024 by Karan Shroff, the former CMO and Partner at Unacademy, alongside gaming industry veteran Anurag Banerjee — who built renowned titles including Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum at Ubisoft and Rocksteady Studios — and Tina Balachandran, formerly a senior VP at Unacademy and an ex-Tencent Games executive. Together, the founding team has worked across more than 40 AAA titles. Shroff’s cricket-specific institutional knowledge runs deep: at Unacademy, he had led the brand’s IPL association and signed Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni as ambassadors — the same Dhoni who is now an investor in his next act.
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eCricket was first publicly unveiled at GDC 2025 in San Francisco, developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and powered by AWS’s Amazon GameLift Streams — a cloud-streaming layer that lets players access high-fidelity gameplay through a browser on any device, bypassing the hardware limitations that have kept console-grade gaming out of reach for most Indian users. The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 and will feature physics-driven gameplay, AI commentary, tactical batting and bowling systems, and a broadcast-style presentation. It will follow a free-to-play model with in-app purchases — player cards, cosmetics, stadium upgrades, and season passes — with no real-money gaming element, keeping it fully compliant with India’s Online Gaming Act, 2025.
The timing matters. India’s mobile gaming revenue grew 15% year over year in Q1 2026, significantly outperforming the global rate of 0.4%, and the broader Indian gaming market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 14.52% through 2031, reaching nearly $10 billion. Yet no Indian studio has credibly produced a AAA title at commercial scale. LightFury is making the most deliberate attempt yet — and with this round, it has the runway, the roster, and the regulatory tailwind to find out if the market is as ready as the numbers suggest.
