Startup Deep Dive : Baazi Games – how a Rs 1,740 crore poker bet got wiped out by one law

In September 2024, Nazara Technologies valued PokerBaazi’s parent company at roughly ₹1,740 crore (~$181 million) and paid ₹982 crore to take control of it. Eleven months later, an Act of Parliament made the company’s core product illegal overnight, and Nazara wrote off ₹914.7 crore of that very investment.

This is the story of Baazi Games, the Delhi-founded company behind PokerBaazi, SportsBaazi and CardBaazi, which spent a decade building India’s largest real-money poker business, survived a retrospective 28% GST demand, won over one of India’s biggest listed gaming groups as its majority owner, and then watched the ground move under the entire industry when the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 banned money games outright. It is a story about how fast a regulated-adjacent business can go from record quarterly revenue to a legally mandated shutdown, and what a company does in the months after.

Quick facts

What Baazi Games does

Baazi Games built and ran a cluster of real-money skill-gaming platforms out of Delhi: PokerBaazi for online poker, SportsBaazi (formerly BalleBaazi) for fantasy sports, CardBaazi for other card games, and RummyBaazi for rummy. Players deposited cash, competed in poker tournaments or cash tables, fantasy contests or rummy games, and the platform kept a service fee, commonly called “rake,” on each contest. PokerBaazi was the dominant piece of the business, contributing about 85% of the group’s net revenue with SportsBaazi adding roughly 12%, according to deal disclosures around Nazara Technologies’ 2024 investment. That entire real-money model stopped being legal to operate in India from August 2025, and the company now runs only free-to-play formats while it works out what comes next.

The origin

Navkiran Singh grew up an avid poker player from his college days at Manipal University, where he studied information technology. He went on to work as a systems engineer at Tata Consultancy Services and at the National Informatics Centre, conventional postings for an engineering graduate in the mid-2000s. A trip to Las Vegas changed the trajectory: Singh saw a thriving, socially accepted poker industry in the West and contrasted it with India, where card games for money carried both a legal grey area and a moral stigma. He has described the gap plainly: real-money gaming platforms, in his words, had “a perception problem in our country, unlike the western world where there is clear awareness and understanding of skill gaming.” He quit his corporate job, and with Puneet Singh, Anirudh Chaudhry, Avneet Rana and Varun Ganjoo, founded Baazi Games in 2014, launching PokerBaazi.com that October as India’s own, India-focused online poker room rather than a copy of an international site. Unusually for a consumer startup, the company said it was profitable from its first year of operation.

The struggle years

Two fights defined the decade after launch, and both were legal rather than competitive.

• State-by-state bans: several states, including Assam, Odisha, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim and Gujarat, extended colonial-era gambling law to cover all money games regardless of skill, forcing PokerBaazi and rivals such as PokerStars, Adda52 and Spartan Poker to geo-block residents of those states and offer them only free-play tables.
• The retrospective GST demand: tax authorities issued Baazi Games/Baazi Networks a show-cause notice for roughly ₹123 crore, applying a 28% Goods and Services Tax rate on the full face value of bets rather than on the platform’s own revenue. The company challenged this before the Supreme Court, which in November 2025 stayed action against Baazi Games pending its verdict in the lead case against Gameskraft.
• That stay did not hold indefinitely: on 27 May 2026, the Supreme Court dismissed the batch of petitions, including Gameskraft’s, and upheld the retrospective 28% GST levy on the full value of bets going back to 2017, reviving tax demands across the industry that one estimate put above ₹2.5 lakh crore.

Individually, either fight could have been survived. Together with what followed in 2025, they closed off the retreat routes a stressed real-money gaming business would normally use.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Baazi Games’ history sits either side of August 2025.

Before: the business was compounding. Gross gaming revenue had grown from ₹848 crore in FY24 to ₹1,363 crore in FY25, near 60% growth, and net revenue hit a record ₹191.8 crore in the April-to-June 2025 quarter alone, up 54% year-on-year, on the back of Indian Premier League-linked marketing. Nazara Technologies had already paid ₹982 crore (reported at the time as roughly $117-118 million) for a 47.7% stake in parent Moonshine Technology in September 2024, later raising its holding to 46.07% and planning to buy out more.

After: Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 (Lok Sabha, 20 August 2025; Rajya Sabha, 21 August 2025) and it received presidential assent on 22 August 2025, banning “online money games” outright regardless of whether skill or chance predominates. Moonshine Technology shut down all real-money contests within days. Nazara terminated a further ₹15.9 crore share purchase from a minority holder, calling the ban a “material adverse effect” on the deal. In the quarter ended 30 September 2025, Nazara booked a ₹914.7 crore impairment against its Moonshine investment and reported a consolidated loss of ₹33.9 crore for the period. Baazi Games cut more than 200 roles, close to 45% of its workforce, in September 2025.

The money behind it

• 2017: $6 million raised, per company-cited figures, to fund early platform growth.
• 2018: a further $5 million from a UK-based investor.
• 2019: $4 million Series A directed at BalleBaazi.com (now SportsBaazi), the fantasy sports vertical.
• 2020: $2 million seed round for RummyBaazi.com plus $1 million invested by the parent company itself.
• September 2024: Nazara Technologies bought a 47.7% stake in Moonshine Technology for ₹831.5 crore in a secondary transaction from existing shareholders, including the founders and private equity firm Bellerive Capital, plus a ₹150 crore primary infusion, taking the total deal to ₹982 crore and making Nazara the controlling shareholder.
• Nazara’s stake stood at 46.07% by 2025, with a further ₹150 crore earmarked through compulsory convertible preference shares before the ban intervened.

Two backers stand out. Nazara Technologies, an NSE-listed gaming group, turned Baazi Games from a founder-and-PE-backed private company into part of a listed portfolio, called it the largest investment it had made at the time, and then absorbed the largest hit in its own results when the ban landed. Bellerive Capital, a private equity investor, was among the existing shareholders who sold down in the 2024 secondary deal, realising an exit that would not have been available a year later at the same valuation. Reported total funding across the early venture rounds runs to roughly $17 million before the Nazara transaction, though public aggregators disagree on the exact cumulative figure, so that number should be read as a floor rather than a settled total.

How it makes money

The model, before August 2025, was a classic skill-gaming rake business.

• Money in: players deposited cash into a wallet and entered poker tournaments, cash tables, fantasy contests or rummy games; PokerBaazi alone recorded Gross Traded Value of ₹8,402 crore in the April-June 2025 quarter.
• The take: the platform charged a service fee (rake) on each contest, which is what shows up as “net revenue” or Gross Gaming Revenue in filings, distinct from the much larger sums players moved between each other.
• Where the fee sits: rake tends to rise as a share of turnover on smaller and mid-stake tables, which is why FY25 gross gaming revenue (up nearly 60%) grew faster than the underlying transaction value, as more traffic shifted to those tables.
• Costs out: advertising was the single largest expense line, at ₹232 crore in FY24 versus ₹127 crore in FY23, an 83% jump, alongside employee costs of ₹89 crore in FY24.
• What people get wrong: Gross Gaming Revenue and Gross Transaction Value are routinely conflated in casual coverage; the ₹1,363 crore FY25 GGR figure is a revenue-like measure, not the much larger amount of money that changed hands on the platform.
• Margin: EBITDA margin was 10.1% in FY24, but had swung to a loss by the April-June 2025 quarter (EBITDA loss of ₹73.9 crore, against a ₹29.3 crore loss in the same quarter a year earlier), as marketing spend around the IPL outran revenue growth even before the ban hit.

The numbers

The two FY23 rows are not a typo. Baazi Networks Private Limited is the operating subsidiary that runs PokerBaazi; Moonshine Technology Private Limited is the holding company that consolidates it with sister entities Ross Technologies, Baazi Games Private Limited and SBN Gaming Network. Corporate filings for the same fiscal year show different revenue depending on which entity is reporting, and this piece surfaces both rather than picking one, since MCA data for the group only becomes cleanly comparable at the consolidated Moonshine level from FY23 onward. On a like-for-like consolidated basis, revenue grew 55% from FY23 to FY24 and profit grew 26.3%. A full FY25 annual profit and loss figure was not available from an audited public filing at the time of writing, though quarterly disclosures point to continued net revenue growth (record ₹191.8 crore in Q1 FY26, up 54% year-on-year) running alongside a widening EBITDA loss.

Where the money comes from

• PokerBaazi: approximately 85% of Moonshine Technology’s net revenue, as of the September 2024 deal disclosures.
• SportsBaazi (fantasy sports): approximately 12% of net revenue over the same period.
• Remaining share: CardBaazi and smaller formats, contribution not separately disclosed.
• User base: PokerBaazi carried roughly 340,000 monthly active users around the time of the Nazara transaction, against a wider Baazi Games registered base reported at 11 million users and monthly retention of about 70% in FY22 commentary.
• Geography and stake-size mix: the surprise in FY25 was that growth came disproportionately from smaller and mid-stake tables, where the platform’s fee take is proportionally higher, rather than from high-roller play, which is why revenue outgrew transaction value.

The risks

• Regulatory risk realised, not hypothetical: the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 already eliminated the company’s core real-money revenue line in a single month; any future business now depends entirely on free-to-play, esports or licensed formats the Act still permits, none of which have a comparable revenue history disclosed.
• Retrospective tax exposure: the Supreme Court’s 27 May 2026 ruling upholding 28% GST on the full face value of historical bets, not just platform revenue, leaves open the size of any final demand on Baazi Games’ own past operations, on top of the roughly ₹123 crore show-cause notice already contested.
• Ownership and balance-sheet strain at the controlling shareholder: Nazara Technologies has already impaired ₹914.7 crore of its investment and reported a consolidated loss in the quarter the ban hit, which limits how much further capital a stressed majority owner can commit to a subsidiary experimenting with unproven new formats.

The takeaway

Baazi Games spent eleven years building a rake business inside a legal grey zone, and for most of that time treated state-level bans and GST notices as the cost of operating there. What the company’s history shows is that a single national law can do in a month what a decade of state-by-state litigation could not: end the model outright, not just tax or restrict it. The lesson is not really about poker or India. It is that any business whose unit economics depend on a regulator’s continued tolerance, rather than a settled legal right, should treat that tolerance as the least durable asset on its balance sheet, however good the growth numbers look the quarter before it disappears.

Frequently asked questions

Is PokerBaazi still legal to play in India?

Real-money play is not. Since the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 took effect in August 2025, PokerBaazi and its sister platforms have offered only free-to-play formats; cash deposits, cash tables and money contests were discontinued nationwide.

Who founded Baazi Games and when?

Navkiran Singh founded Baazi Games in 2014 with co-founders Puneet Singh, Anirudh Chaudhry, Avneet Rana and Varun Ganjoo, launching the flagship platform PokerBaazi.com that October.

How much did Nazara Technologies invest in Baazi Games?

Nazara paid ₹982 crore in September 2024 for a 47.7% stake in parent company Moonshine Technology, later holding 46.07%, making it the controlling shareholder ahead of the 2025 ban.

Was Baazi Games profitable before the ban?

Yes, on a full-year basis. Moonshine Technology reported a net profit of ₹24 crore on ₹415 crore of revenue in FY24. By the April-June 2025 quarter, however, record net revenue of ₹191.8 crore came with an EBITDA loss of ₹73.9 crore, driven by IPL-linked marketing spend, even before the ban took effect.

What happened to Baazi Games employees after the ban?

The company cut more than 200 roles, about 45% of its workforce, in September 2025, as it wound down real-money operations and evaluated free-to-play and other formats still permitted under the new law.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “PokerBaazi parent crosses Rs 400 Cr revenue in FY24; profits grew 26%,” February 2025
• Entrackr, “Baazi Games’ revenue crossed Rs 200 Cr in FY23; profit grew nearly 4X,” February 2024
• Inc42, “How Online Poker Platform PokerBaazi Clocked A 64% Revenue Jump In FY22,” 2022
• Business Standard, “Nazara Technologies acquires 47.7% stake in Moonshine Technology (PokerBaazi),” September 2024
• YourStory, “Nazara to invest Rs 982 Cr in PokerBaazi parent Moonshine Technology,” September 2024
• Storyboard18, “Nazara terminates ₹15.9 crore PokerBaazi stake purchase after online money gaming ban,” August 2025
• Storyboard18, “Nazara takes ₹914.7 crore hit after Moonshine write-off following Online Money Gaming ban,” November 2025
• Free Press Journal, “Nazara Technologies Reports ₹33.9 Crore Loss, Records Impairment On Investment In Moonshine Technologies,” November 2025
• Angel One, “Nazara Technologies Faces ₹830 Crore PokerBaazi Investment Risk from Online Gaming Bill 2025,” August 2025
• Angel One, “PokerBaazi to Dream11: Real Money Gaming Platforms Shut Down After Online Gaming Act Implementation,” August 2025
• Inc42, “After MPL, PokerBaazi To Sack 50% Of Its Workforce,” September 2025
• Storyboard18, “PokerBaazi hits record ₹191.8 cr net revenue in Q1 FY26, up 54% YoY,” 2025
• StudyCafe, “SC Puts GST Demand on Hold for Baazi Games Until Final Decision in Gameskraft Case,” November 2025
• BusinessToday, “Supreme Court upholds 28% GST on online gaming; ₹1 lakh cr tax burden looms,” May 2026
• Wikipedia, “Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025,” accessed September 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “This 31-Year-Old Is Quashing Country’s Ill Perception Towards Skill Games,” January 2021
• YourStory, “Game face on, this Indian startup is working to end the social stigma around poker,” 2017
• Poker Industry PRO, “PokerBaazi Shuts Down Free-to-Play, Subscription Poker Platform Months After Launch,” 2026
• Poker Spot, “What prohibits Poker in Assam, Gujarat, Telangana and Odisha,” accessed September 2026

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