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Sporta Technologies Private Limited
Dream11 runs a fantasy sports app where fans build virtual teams of real players and win cash prizes based on how those players perform in actual matches.
Dream11 is a fantasy sports app. You pick real cricketers — or footballers, kabaddi players, and others — into a virtual team before a match, and your team scores points based on what those players actually do on the field. If your team does well, you can win cash. It is, in plain terms, a game of skill wrapped around live sports, and it has become one of the most popular apps in India.
The money flows in a simple way. Most users play for free, but to enter paid contests with bigger prize pools, they pay an entry fee. Dream11 collects those fees and pays out the vast majority as winnings, keeping a slice as its fee. That slice, multiplied across millions of contests and tens of millions of users, is the business. The company also makes money from advertising and brand sponsorships. Cricket is the engine: the Indian Premier League and major international matches drive huge spikes in traffic, and Dream11 has been the IPL's official fantasy partner for years. The business lives or dies on trust and scale. Users must believe the scoring is fair and the payouts are real, and the platform must handle enormous traffic surges when a big match starts. Its main competitors in India are other fantasy platforms such as Mpl and smaller apps, plus the broader pull of online gaming. Dream11 is not a betting exchange — it is a skill-gaming platform — but it operates in a grey zone in India, where real-money online gaming has faced legal challenges and heavy taxation. A 28% tax on deposits for online gaming introduced in 2023 hit the economics of the industry hard, and Dream11 has had to adapt its pricing and contests accordingly.
Dream11 is backed by investors including Tencent and Tiger Global, and it reached a valuation of around $8 billion at its peak. During the COVID-19 shutdown, when real sports stopped, the company pivoted temporarily to fantasy contests around things like video game streams, and it has also expanded into football, kabaddi, and other sports to reduce its dependence on cricket. Its biggest vulnerability is concentration: cricket and the IPL carry most of its revenue, and any legal or tax shock in India's online gaming market matters more to Dream11 than almost anything else.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026