Lightfury Games raises $11M to build realistic eCricket mobile game

LightFury Games has turned cricket fandom into a funding story with real mobile-game stakes. The Bengaluru studio raised $11 million in pre-Series A money on April 23, 2026, and the round is unusual because it is not just institutional capital. MS Dhoni, Jasprit Bumrah, Hardik Pandya, Shreyas Iyer, Ravindra Jadeja, Tilak Varma and Sai Sudharsan all came in as strategic backers, alongside Blume Ventures, V3 Ventures, Times Internet and MIXI.

The company said the new cash will go straight into finishing eCricket and building the live-operations stack that keeps a mobile sports game alive after launch, including post-launch content pipelines and the systems needed to support updates at scale. LightFury is building the game on Unreal Engine 5, with physics-led gameplay, real-time decision systems, AI-driven commentary and a broadcast-style presentation. That mix matters because most cricket games have lived in the shadow of arcade handling or real-money formats. LightFury is betting there is room for something closer to a premium sports franchise, not another throwaway licensed title.

The roster behind the game makes that bet even louder. LightFury said it secured a global player licence covering more than 600 professional cricketers, including Chris Gayle, Joe Root, Ben Stokes, Kane Williamson, Pat Cummins, Jos Buttler, Travis Head and Andre Russell. The studio said more than 150,000 users have already signed up for early access, a useful sign that the pitch is landing before a public launch. LightFury has also said eCricket is slated for a mobile release in 2026, with a phased expansion to PC and console around 2027-28.

That ambition lands at exactly the right moment for India, where mobile gaming is huge but still badly under-monetized. Sensor Tower said India recorded 8.45 billion mobile-game installs in FY 2024-25, but in-app-purchase revenue was just over $400 million. In other words, the audience is there, the spending curve is still shallow, and a cricket game with celebrity credibility has a chance to push harder on monetization without immediately drifting into the real-money gaming lane.

LightFury was founded in 2024 by Karan Shroff, Tina Balachandran and Anurag Banerjee. Shroff previously served as chief marketing officer at Unacademy, Balachandran worked at Unacademy and Tencent Games, and Banerjee came from Ubisoft Singapore. The studio opened its first Bengaluru facility near Bengaluru International Airport on July 9, 2024, after an $8.5 million seed round led by Blume Ventures and MIXI. The bigger question now is whether star-powered capital can do for cricket what a lot of publishers have failed to do for years: turn the sport’s massive digital audience into a durable mobile IP instead of a niche download spike.