The AAA cricket game studio has assembled a star-studded investor lineup, alongside Blume Ventures and Times Internet, as it prepares to launch eCricket later this year.
A gaming startup building what it describes as India’s first AAA cricket title has closed an $11 million pre-Series A round, and the investor list reads less like a cap table and more like an Indian cricket XI.
MS Dhoni, Jasprit Bumrah, and Hardik Pandya have all come on board as investors in LightFury Games, joined by fellow cricketers Shreyas Iyer, Ravindra Jadeja, Tilak Varma, and Sai Sudharsan. Institutional backers in the round include Blume Ventures, V3 Ventures, Japanese gaming company MIXI, and Times Internet.
What LightFury Is Building
Founded in 2024 by Karan Shroff, Anurag Banerjee, and Tina Balachandran, LightFury Games is developing eCricket, a mobile-first AAA title built on Unreal Engine 5. The game combines physics-led gameplay with strategic batting and bowling systems designed to replicate real-world player styles and match dynamics. The company has also secured a global player roster licence covering more than 600 professional cricketers, including Chris Gayle, Ben Stokes, and Pat Cummins.
How the Capital Will Be Used
LightFury says the freshly raised funds will go toward completing game development and building out its live operations infrastructure, including post-launch content pipelines and systems to sustain long-term player engagement.
What Backers Are Saying
Blume Ventures co-founder Karthik Reddy, who backed LightFury from its earliest days, said the studio has shown the kind of creative discipline and technical depth that AAA game development demands. He described eCricket as potentially the Dhurandhar moment for Indian gaming, referencing the blockbuster Bollywood spy film, and said natively built AI tools were giving the team an additional edge heading into launch.
With cricketing royalty now holding equity and a global licence already in place, LightFury is setting up eCricket as something considerably more ambitious than a mobile cricket game.
Whether the final product delivers on that promise will be decided by the rest of 2026.
