Harsh Jain says he heard "no" close to 150 times from investors before one said yes. He told an industry summit in Delhi in November 2019 that he kept going until Kalaari Capital agreed to invest in 2014.
It had begun years earlier as a friendship. Jain and Bhavit Sheth were school friends who bonded over sports and FIFA. Jain went to high school in the UK in 1998, where he discovered fantasy sports and got Sheth and others hooked. He briefly worked at Microsoft, then joined the family business; Sheth had short stints at Godrej and a financial research firm. Both were unhappy and wanted to work in sports, gaming and tech.
Jain and Bhavit Sheth were school friends who bonded over sports and FIFA.
After finishing engineering in 2007, Jain pitched a startup just as the IPL was launching. His friends nodded, but only Sheth joined him. They started with a free, ad-supported site with fantasy sports at its core. Everyone around them, Jain has said, thought it a bad idea, and they were too stubborn to listen. The ad model failed because Indian ad rates were far lower than in the West. For about a year and a half they burned through money from friends and family, and Jain has admitted they were too stubborn to tell their families they had been wrong.
Survival came sideways. They started a social media agency, won Mumbai Indians as a client, and used its cash to keep Dream11 alive until it found its footing. Banks refused to open accounts, Jain recalled, because they thought gaming meant gambling. During his MBA at Columbia Business School, American VCs told him to pitch in India instead. Sheth later said the biggest lesson was persistence: they got better with every rejection.
What changed was a conversation. In 2014 Sheth met Vani Kola of Kalaari Capital, who backed them despite not being a sports fan, because she saw a capable team and a large market. Sheth said the money mattered less than the signal that they were on the right track. Kola also taught Jain to stay calm in a funding round. A 2017 court ruling that the game was skill-based eased what Jain called one of the most stressful stretches, when people questioned whether the business was legal at all. Users grew from 1 million in 2014 to 45 million by 2018.
The same legal ground shook again. Karnataka suspended operations in October 2021, a suspension reversed in February 2022. On 21 August 2025 Parliament outlawed real-money games, and paid contests, over 90% of revenue, were paused. At its peak the company was valued at $8 billion.
For a first-time founder, the lesson sits in the side business: the agency nobody planned bought the time the main idea needed.