Dream Sports, India’s most valuable and profitable gaming unicorn, under which falls its flagship fantasy sports behemoth Dream11, is massively pivoting its business model. A move necessitated by the recently promulgated Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025.
The Act, which bans all forms of real-money gaming in India, in one stroke not just wiped off a reported $45 billion from India’s RMG sector, but critically for the sports technology major, erased 95% of the group’s revenues and ALL its profits. For some context, Dream Sports reported an operational revenue of Rs 6,384 crore ($730 million) for the financial year 2023, up from Rs 3,841 crore in the previous fiscal.
Founded in 2008 by Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth, Dream Sports was last valued at $8bn when it received $840 million by way of funding in November 2021.
Dream11’s first concrete response to the Act was delivered on August 22, when it announced a halt to all paid contests on the platform and shifted entirely to free-to-play online social games.
Following that decision, Jain, in interviews to Indian media outlets, has laid out the roadmap for Dream Sports in the short to medium term now that the old “business model is dead”.
According to Jain, the priority now “is to build new products that you can monetise in the future”.
Focus on AI
Speaking to Moneycontrol, Jain said that going forward, the company plans to concentrate all its efforts on sports-related opportunities in India using artificial intelligence (AI), with a special focus on the creator economy.
“We have sports content, sports commerce, sports fan engagement, sports analytics, sports performance, sports merchandise. All of this is going to get disrupted by AI. And now I have 500 engineers who I can allocate to solving these problems,” Jain said. “We will start again to solve these problems for Indian sports fans.”
“We have 260 million users. We have a brand that’s loved and trusted by a lot of people. We have an amazing talent pool with us and we have some capital that will help us get to product market fit for a lot of the ideas we are pursuing now,” Jain added.
Dream Sports will also consider expanding to international markets (presumably where RMG is legal), but will continue to prioritise India, he said.
No layoffs
Jain has also ruled out any layoffs at Dream Sports.
“We’re not interested in doing any layoffs. All the talent here is safe,” Jain told Moneycontrol on August 25.
“We are interested in building with this talent to dig ourselves out of this hole. The only way to deal with 95 percent of your revenue being gone is to build new products that you can monetise in the future. That will always start with talent,” he said.
Jain said the company currently has significant internal demand for talent across its existing businesses, including its sports content and commerce platform FanCode, sports experiences platform DreamSetGo, mobile game development unit Dream Game Studios, and fintech venture Dream Money, as well as for new products the company plans to develop in the future.
Jain added that Dream Sports has sufficient cash reserves to maintain its talent pool and run operations for a couple of years, which he believes is more than enough.
The Dream Sports co-founder compared the company’s situation to that of a Series B startup. “We already have more than a Series B company has. We have capital, we have the people, we have the user base, we have a brand, and we have some entrepreneurs that are a little more battle scarred than even before,” he said.
Jain added that if any of the products succeed, Dream Sports’ distribution modes allow them to distribute it “widely overnight and hyperscale it”.
