Dream11 CEO Harsh Jain’s comments come days after Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025.
Dream Sports, the parent company of fantasy gaming giant Dream11, will not resort to layoffs despite being hit by India’s ban on real-money games, co-founder and CEO Harsh Jain has said.
“95 per cent of Dream11’s revenues have disappeared overnight, and 100 per cent of our profits…,” Harsh Jain told Moneycontrol on Monday.
Dream Sports has been a major real-money gaming player in India, but it has to close its money-based games after the government banned all forms of online money games.
Jain’s comments come days after Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, criminalising the offering and financing of such games, with offenders facing up to five years in prison.
“We are not interested in doing any layoffs. All the talent here is safe,” Jain said in the interview.
Dream11 has also intimated to the Board of Control for Cricket in India that it won’t be able to continue with the title sponsorship of the team as the revenue stream is going to get hit badly.
“The only way to deal with 95 per cent of your revenue being gone is to build new products that you can monetise in the future. That will always start with talent,” Jain said, adding that the company has no plans to challenge the government on the ban.
The Mumbai-based company plans to redeploy its 500 engineers and other staff across existing businesses such as FanCode, DreamSetGo, Dream Game Studios and Dream Money, while also working on new AI-driven products for the sports and creator economy.
“We have sports content, commerce, fan engagement, analytics, sports performance, and merchandise. All of this is going to be disrupted by AI. And now I have 500 engineers whom I can allocate to solving these problems,” Jain said. “We will start again to solve these problems for Indian sports fans.”
Jain asserted that Dream Sports has sufficient cash reserves to retain staff and sustain operations for the next couple of years. In FY23, the company reported operational revenue of ₹6,384.49 crore, up from ₹3,841 crore in FY22.
According to news agency PTI, Dream Sports is testing a new app, Dream Money, to foray into the financial services sector.
“Dream Money has been under pilot for the last few months. The platform has not been launched yet,” PTI reported, citing an unnamed source.
As per information available on Google Play Store, the app will offer gold purchase service on a daily basis, starting from ₹10 per day and fixed deposits starting from ₹1,000.
According to the source, the official name of the new platform is “Dream Suite Platform Private Limited”.
