Harsh Jain & Bhavit Sheth

Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth co-founded Dream11 in 2008 and built it into India's dominant fantasy-sports platform, a trajectory defined less by the product than by the sustained regulatory navigation required to defend the fantasy format against the Indian gambling law regime across multiple states.

The Supreme Court of India's findings that Dream11's format constitutes a game of skill rather than a game of chance — the legal foundation on which the entire Indian fantasy-sports category rests — is the single regulatory event that defines the company, and was contested case by case across multiple state jurisdictions.

The decision to anchor the IPL and BCCI partnership as the brand's primary distribution — rather than building an independent user-acquisition surface — reflected an understanding that fantasy demand in India is event-driven and that the cricket calendar, not the platform, is the acquisition channel.

The 2019 unicorn round, led by a strategic investor with sports-betting exposure, placed Dream11 at the intersection of the Indian consumer-internet cohort and the global sports-betting industry, a positioning that has shaped both its regulatory posture and its eventual IPO planning.