There was no businessman who built Dream11, but 2 students of IITs laid the foundation of it. When Harsh Jain and Bhavit Seth put their idea in front of people for funding, they faced a rejection 150 times. Wherever both go, no one is ready to invest money in their idea. Despite this, both did not give up and launched an app playing a fantasy game named Dream11 in 2008. Today, the market capital of this startup is around 70 thousand crore rupees. Both of them studied together with IIT Bombay.
Harsh Jain, co-founder and chief enforcement officer (CEO) of Dream11, has an MBA from Columbia Business School after graduation from Pennsylvania University. Before making Dream11, Jain launched the social media agency Red Digital. Harsh is also the Chairman of the Indian Fantasy Sport Federation. Harsh Jain is the son of Anand Jain, chairman of companies like Jai Corp Limited, Urban Infra Venture Capital Limited. Bhavit Seth, the company’s second co-founder and COO, has done an engineering from Bentley University in Boston and did a diploma from Harvard to e-commerce strategy. Before Dream11, Seth was also a co-founder of Red Digital. Later this startup was bought by Gozoop. Today, about 1,000 employees work in Dream11.
First investment received in 2014
It had been 6 years since Harsha and Bhavit’s Startup Dream11 started, but they did not get any investment. Finally, in the year 2014, the funding of Series 1 was found and Kalari Capital and Think Investment put money in it for the first time. After this, in January 2016, both these companies also funded Series B and in January 2017, many investors got the funding of Series C. Then in September 2018, Tensant invested $ 100 million, while in April, 2019, 6 crores and September 2020 got an investment of $ 22.5 million. In March 2021, this startup received a big investment of $ 400 million. In November this year, companies like D1 Capital Partners, DST Global, Falcon Edge India, Redbird Capital Partners, Tiger Global Management made a force of $ 84 million in this startup.
Dream11 started getting real growth from the year 2020, when it got IPL sponsorship. After this, the company did not look back and till March 2024, it had about 22 crore active users. Out of this, 2.5 crore were registered users. The company has introduced a live content of 40 thousand hours by March 2024. Currently, the company has more than 29 sports brand partners. This startup was the country’s first unicorn with fantasy games.
How much company earns
Talking about the profits and earnings of Dream11, by 2023, its operational revenue had been Rs 6,384 crore, which is almost doubled as compared to 3,841 crores in 2022. The company’s net profit has also increased by 32 per cent to Rs 188 crore on an annual basis. However, the company has not yet released the results of financial 2024 and 25.
