LightFury Games and the money behind eCricket

eCricket is the debut title from LightFury Games, a 100-person AAA studio with teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru. In April 2026 the studio announced an $11 million pre-Series A round with backing from Blume, V3 Ventures, MIXI and Times Internet — and with seven Indian international cricketers joining as strategic investors.

The round, in facts

Why the investor list matters

Seven current or former Indian internationals putting money into a studio is not a normal marketing arrangement, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not:

• It is equity in the studio, not a sponsorship, not a licensing deal, and not a promise that each investor appears in the game.
• It gives the studio something a debut team rarely has: credibility with the exact audience the game needs — Indian cricket fans — before a single build is public.
• It aligns the game's launch with the people whose names give the broadcast its authority, which is consistent with a product built around licensed players and commentary.

The live-ops sentence is the important one

The press release says the capital is "primarily deployed to complete game development and strengthen its live operations (live ops) capabilities… post-launch infrastructure content pipelines and systems designed to deliver a high-quality, continuously evolving player experience at scale."

That is a statement about the kind of game eCricket is: a live-service title with content pipelines, not a boxed release. It also explains the phased launch. A studio building live-ops capability tests servers and multiplayer in public before it opens a market, which is exactly the sequence on the Game Access page.

A debut studio swinging at AAA

The framing throughout the announcement is deliberately national: "a AAA cricket game from India with global ambitions", against a sport with an audience estimated at over 2.5 billion. Blume's Karthik Reddy put it more colourfully, saying they would like eCricket to be "the Dhurandhar of Indian gaming history".

Two things follow for anyone following the game:

1. The comparison set is global, not regional. A studio describing its debut as AAA is asking to be measured against international sports titles, not against other Indian mobile games.
2. The schedule is honest about risk. Three phases with two open-ended transitions is what a studio does when it intends to fix things between windows rather than pretend the first build is final.

Read next: the roadmap, gameplay, or what carries over from the beta.

Keep browsing

All guides8

Beta

eCricket closed beta: dates, batches and access

Roadmap

eCricket release date and roadmap

Rewards

What carries over from the beta

Gameplay

eCricket gameplay: what the eight features mean

Roster

eCricket players and teams

Competitive

Competitive multiplayer and the esports angle

Platforms

eCricket platforms and availability

FAQ

eCricket FAQ