Startup Deep Dive : Gameskraft — the profitable gaming company a Rs 21,000 crore tax notice and a national ban caught up with

Gameskraft made more profit in FY25 than most funded Indian startups will see in a decade, and it did this without ever taking a rupee of institutional venture capital. Then, inside about a year, the Supreme Court revived a ₹21,000 crore (~$2.2 billion) tax notice against the company, and a new national law switched off the business model it was built on.

Gameskraft is the Bengaluru company behind RummyCulture, Gamezy, Pocket52 and a handful of other real-money card, board and fantasy-sports apps. For most of its life it was a quiet, cash-generating outlier in a sector famous for burning venture money. In 2025 and 2026 it became the test case for whether India’s entire real-money gaming industry has a legal future at all.

Quick facts

What they do

Gameskraft builds and runs real-money skill-gaming apps for Indian retail players: RummyCulture and RummyPrime for cash rummy, Gamezy for fantasy sports, Pocket52 for poker, and LudoCulture and Playship for board and casual games played for stakes. A player deposits money into an in-app wallet, plays against other users, and Gameskraft keeps a cut of each game as a platform fee, the same rake model used by any card room, just run through a phone. Before August 2025 this was the company’s entire business; since then, the same apps have had to strip out real-money play in India, and the company is working out what, if anything, replaces it (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025).

The origin

Prithvi Singh, a computer science graduate of Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Delhi, had worked as a staff engineer at Grofers (now Blinkit) and held engineering and architecture roles at CA Technologies, Trilogy and Ignite Technologies before starting Gameskraft in Bengaluru in June 2017 (as reported by StartupTalky, 2023). His stated insight was simple: most online games available to Indian users at the time were built by foreign studios for foreign audiences, with foreign payment rails, foreign game variants and no real feel for how Indians actually play cards. Rummy, in particular, was already a living-room and railway-platform game across the country; nobody had built a serious mobile product around it. RummyCulture, launched the same year, was Gameskraft’s first product and became, within a few years, one of India’s largest cash-rummy platforms by user count, according to the company’s own figures cited by StartupTalky. Gamezy, a fantasy-sports app, followed in 2019, and poker platform Pocket52 and other titles were added as the company diversified within the same real-money category.

The struggle years

Gameskraft’s growth was not a straight line, and each setback traces back to the same fault line: Indian law has never definitively settled whether games like rummy, when played for money, are skill or gambling.

In November 2021, officials from the Directorate General of GST Intelligence searched Gameskraft’s premises, the opening move in what would become the company’s defining legal battle (as reported by SCC Online, May 2023). Weeks later, in October 2021, the Karnataka state government amended the Karnataka Police Act to ban all online games played for stakes, skill or chance, forcing Gameskraft and its Bengaluru-based peers to suspend real-money operations in their home state until the Karnataka High Court struck the amendment down as unconstitutional in February 2022 (as reported by TechRadar and The Quint, 2022).

The bigger blow landed on 23 September 2022: the DGGI issued a show-cause notice demanding roughly ₹21,000 crore (~$2.2 billion) in GST, interest and penalty, alleging Gameskraft should have paid 28% tax on the full value of every rupee players had ever staked, not the 18% it had been paying on its platform commission (as reported by SCC Online and Medianama, 2023). The Karnataka High Court quashed that notice on 11 May 2023, calling it arbitrary, but the tax authorities appealed straight to the Supreme Court, and the matter never really went away.

Then came two setbacks that had nothing to do with courts. From October 2023, a new national GST rule imposed 28% tax on the full face value of every game played, industry-wide, permanently compressing margins for every real-money platform including Gameskraft; the company later said this rule alone pushed its tax outflow from ₹1,512 crore in FY24 to ₹2,526 crore in FY25 (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025). And in its FY25 results, Gameskraft disclosed that its former chief financial officer, Ramesh Prabhu, had diverted more than ₹231 crore of company funds into personal futures-and-options trades over three to four years before being caught; the company filed a police complaint and took an exceptional charge against profit (as reported by Outlook Business and Entrackr, September 2025).

The turning point

The single event that reshaped Gameskraft’s story is the Supreme Court’s judgment of 27 May 2026 in the DGGI-versus-Gameskraft case. The court held that online rummy, poker and fantasy-sports platforms supply “actionable claims” in the nature of betting and gambling, that 28% GST applies to the full face value of every stake regardless of whether the underlying game is one of skill or chance, and that the original ₹21,000 crore show-cause notice from September 2022 stands restored, with Gameskraft free to argue its case afresh before the tax authority (as reported by TaxScan and CA Club India, 2026). Set the numbers side by side: in the year the notice was first issued, Gameskraft’s full-year revenue was about ₹2,112 crore and its profit about ₹937 crore (as reported by Entrackr, January 2023); the revived demand is roughly ten times that year’s revenue and, by extension, larger than every rupee of profit the company had banked since its founding. The ruling does not, by itself, mean Gameskraft owes ₹21,000 crore — that fight moves to the adjudicating authority — but it removed the one thing that had let the company plan around the case for three years: the assumption that the notice was dead.

The money behind it

Here Gameskraft is genuinely unusual among Indian gaming companies. Rivals such as Dream11, Games24x7 and Mobile Premier League built their scale on hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Tiger Global, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) and Tencent. Gameskraft did not. Singh started the company on savings and money from friends and family, and multiple accounts describe it as bootstrapped in the plain sense of the word: no venture round, no board seats for outside investors, no pressure to grow into a valuation (as reported by Buildd and StartupTalky). Corporate-data aggregators Tracxn and Crunchbase list only a pair of small angel cheques, together worth roughly $242,000, from individual investors rather than funds. There is no market valuation on record because no institutional round ever priced one. The trade-off shows up directly in the numbers: while VC-backed peer MPL posted a loss of about ₹298 crore in the same year Gameskraft reported a profit of ₹1,062 crore, according to Buildd’s 2023 comparison of the two companies’ filings. Owning the company outright is also precisely why the GST case and the 2025 ban hit so hard — there is no outside investor’s balance sheet to cushion the blow, and no fresh funding round on the horizon to plug a hole this size.

How it makes money

The mechanics are close to a card room’s: players fund an in-app wallet, join a cash table or contest, and Gameskraft takes a platform fee, essentially a rake, out of each game rather than out of winnings. In FY25 this platform fee and commission income came to ₹3,882 crore, or 99.6% of the company’s ₹3,896 crore in operating revenue (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025) — in other words, Gameskraft is almost entirely a single-line business, however many app names it operates under. The historical dispute with tax authorities is exactly about where that revenue line should be measured from: Gameskraft argued, and the Karnataka High Court agreed in 2023, that GST should apply to its commission alone, since it is a skill-game platform rather than a bookmaker; the DGGI argued, and the Supreme Court ultimately agreed in 2026, that GST should apply to the entire amount staked by players, since the underlying activity is betting. That distinction, worth 28% of total stakes versus 18% of a much smaller commission, is the part most outside observers get wrong: this was never really a dispute about whether Gameskraft pays tax, but about the size of the number tax is calculated on. On costs, user acquisition dominates: advertising and promotional spend was ₹2,072 crore in FY25, up 58% from ₹1,315 crore in FY24 and about three-quarters of total expenses, reflecting how competitive and marketing-heavy real-money gaming had become even for a profitable incumbent (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025). Employee costs, by contrast, fell 11% to ₹410 crore in the same year. The result was a 24.9% EBITDA margin and a return on capital employed of 45.7% in FY25, high even by the standards of asset-light internet businesses (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025).

The numbers

Figures below are from Gameskraft Technologies’ annual filings as reported by Entrackr, and are stated in ₹ crore.

Profit peaked in FY23 and has fallen in each of the two years since, even as revenue kept growing, because two costs rose faster than the top line: GST outflow, which the company says climbed from ₹1,512 crore in FY24 to ₹2,526 crore in FY25 after the 28% full-face-value rule took full-year effect, and the one-off ₹231 crore CFO fraud write-off booked in FY25 (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025).

Where the money comes from

Almost all of Gameskraft’s revenue is one thing: platform commission on real-money games, at ₹3,882 crore of ₹3,896 crore in FY25 operating revenue, with rummy under the RummyCulture and RummyPrime brands as the dominant contributor by user base and downloads (as reported by Entrackr and StartupTalky). Poker brand Pocket52 had already paused operations in May 2024, ahead of the wider 2025 ban, narrowing the product mix even before the law changed (as reported by Inc42, November 2025). Every rupee of that gaming revenue comes from India; there is no disclosed international user base or overseas licensing income to fall back on. The one genuine surprise in the filings is a small real-estate revenue line of about ₹11 crore in FY25, sitting inside a company whose entire public identity is built around rummy and fantasy sports (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025) — a reminder that even a single-product company’s balance sheet can carry odd, minor side businesses that never make it into the pitch.

The risks

The first and largest risk is regulatory concentration: Gameskraft earned essentially all its revenue from one activity, in one country, and in August 2025 that country’s parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act in a matter of days, banning real-money online games outright and criminalising their operation and advertising (as reported by Law.asia and India Briefing, August 2025). A single piece of legislation, not competition or a demand slowdown, is what forced roughly 400 layoffs by November 2025 out of a workforce that had numbered around 600 (as reported by Inc42 and Storyboard18, November 2025). The second risk is the revived GST liability: the Supreme Court’s May 2026 ruling puts the ₹21,000 crore notice back in play, and while Gameskraft can still contest the amount at the adjudicating-authority stage, the figure is large enough relative to the company’s cash and mutual-fund holdings, about ₹253 crore in cash and ₹1,319 crore in mutual fund investments at FY25 year-end, that a materially adverse outcome would be a serious strain (as reported by Entrackr, September 2025). The third risk is internal control: a company that never had venture investors also never had the outside board scrutiny that typically comes with them, and the undetected multi-year diversion of over ₹231 crore by its own finance chief is a governance failure that surfaced only after the money was largely gone (as reported by Outlook Business, September 2025).

The takeaway

Being bootstrapped and profitable is real proof that a business works, but it is not the same as being safe. Gameskraft spent eight years proving it did not need outside capital to build one of India’s most profitable internet companies, and none of that discipline mattered once a single government decision redefined what its product was allowed to be. The lesson is less about gaming specifically than about any business built entirely inside one contestable legal classification: the healthiest balance sheet in the world cannot buy you a second business model on short notice, and the time to have one in your back pocket is before the law changes, not after.

Frequently asked questions

What does Gameskraft do?

Gameskraft is a Bengaluru company that built and operated real-money gaming apps in India, including RummyCulture and RummyPrime for cash rummy, Gamezy for fantasy sports, and Pocket52 for poker, earning a platform fee on each game played for stakes.

Who founded Gameskraft and when?

Prithvi Singh, an engineer who had previously worked at Grofers (now Blinkit), founded Gameskraft in Bengaluru in June 2017, starting with the rummy app RummyCulture.

What is the ₹21,000 crore GST case against Gameskraft?

In September 2022, India’s GST intelligence directorate issued Gameskraft a show-cause notice for about ₹21,000 crore (~$2.2 billion), arguing the company should have paid 28% tax on the full value of player stakes rather than 18% on its platform commission. The Karnataka High Court quashed the notice in 2023, but the Supreme Court’s May 2026 judgment restored it, sending the matter back for fresh adjudication.

How did the 2025 Online Gaming Act affect Gameskraft?

The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, passed in August 2025, banned real-money online games in India and their advertising. It forced Gameskraft to halt cash-game operations across its apps and led to roughly 400 layoffs by November 2025, alongside an earlier pause of its Pocket52 poker platform in May 2024.

Did Gameskraft ever raise venture capital funding?

No meaningful institutional venture round is on record. Multiple accounts describe Gameskraft as bootstrapped from founder savings and friends-and-family money, with corporate-data trackers listing only small angel cheques totalling roughly $242,000, in contrast to venture-backed peers like Dream11 and Mobile Premier League.

Is Gameskraft profitable?

Yes, historically. It reported net profit of ₹937 crore in FY22, ₹1,062 crore in FY23, ₹947 crore in FY24 and ₹706 crore in FY25, with the recent decline driven by higher GST outflow after the 28% full-face-value rule and a one-off ₹231 crore fraud write-off, according to Entrackr’s reporting of the company’s filings. Its financial performance after the 2025 real-money gaming ban has not yet been separately disclosed.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Gameskraft crosses Rs 4,000 Cr revenue in FY25; PAT down 25%”, September 2025
• Entrackr, “Gameskraft achieves Rs 3,500 Cr income in FY24 with Rs 947 Cr PAT”, 2024
• Entrackr, “Gameskraft reports Rs 1,062 Cr profit after tax in FY23”, December 2023
• Entrackr, “Bootstrapped startup Gameskraft crossed Rs 900 Cr profit in FY22”, January 2023
• Outlook Business, “Gameskraft Lays off 120 Employees Amid Real-Money Gaming Ban, Ex-CFO Fraud”, September 2025
• Inc42, “Real Money Gaming Ban: Gameskraft’s Layoff Count Climbs To 400”, November 2025
• Storyboard18, “Gameskraft layoffs cross 400 as Online Money Gaming ban forces deep restructuring”, November 2025
• SCC Online, “Karnataka HC quashes GST Intimation Notice to the tune of Rs 21,000 crores against Gameskraft”, May 2023
• Medianama, “GST authorities, SC, and the Rs 21000 crore Gameskraft verdict”, September 2023
• TaxScan, “GST Liability on Online Gaming Under Spotlight as Supreme Court hears Gameskraft’s ₹21,000Cr GST Demand Case”, 2026
• CA Club India, “Supreme Court on GST & Online Gaming: Tax Applies on Betting and Gambling Irrespective of Skill or Chance”, 2026
• The Quint / TechRadar, coverage of Karnataka High Court striking down the Karnataka Police (Amendment) Act, 2021, February 2022
• Law.asia, “India’s new gaming law bans real-money play”, August 2025
• India Briefing, “India Bans Real-Money Gaming Online”, August 2025
• StartupTalky, “Gameskraft: How is it creating a World-Class Gaming Experience for the Indian Users”, 2023
• Buildd Newsletter, “Gameskraft’s secret to bootstrapped billion-dollar success”, 2023
• Tracxn and Crunchbase company profiles for Gameskraft, funding and investor data, accessed September 2026

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