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Startup Deep Dive : JetSynthesys — a profit built on selling a stake, not selling more games

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for JetSynthesys.

In the year ending March 2025, JetSynthesys booked a net profit of ₹14.4 crore ($1.5 million) — its first clean turnaround in years, after a ₹97.5 crore net loss the year before. Almost all of that swing came from one line item: a ₹164.8 crore gain from selling down its stake in a cricket-gaming subsidiary to a South Korean video-game giant, not from the core business suddenly working.

That is the story of JetSynthesys in one number: a two-decade-old family-office bet, run by a NASA-trained engineer who once watched a laser-disc business collapse overnight, that has built a scattered portfolio of gaming, esports, music and wellness apps in India — profitable on paper for the first time only because it sold a piece of itself. Backed since 2020 by Adar Poonawalla’s family office and, since April 2025, by Krafton (maker of PUBG), the Pune-based company says it is now eyeing a stock-market listing within three years.

Quick facts

Company JetSynthesys Private Limited (incorporated 22 August 2012; business launched 2014)
Founded 2014, Pune, Maharashtra
Founder(s) Rajan Navani (Founder, Chairman & CEO)
Businesses Casual and licensed-IP gaming, esports, digital/regional music, wellness apps, celebrity-led platforms, a fintech joint venture
Latest FY revenue ₹207.6 crore ($21.6 million), FY25 (year to March 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss ₹14.4 crore net profit, FY25 (versus a ₹97.5 crore net loss in FY24)
Listed Private; company has stated an intent to list in 18–36 months from April 2025
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed; latest funding round (April 2025) did not disclose an amount or valuation
Key shareholders Rajan Navani/Jetline Group, Adar Poonawalla’s Pratithi Investments (Serum Institute family office), Kris Gopalakrishnan, Krafton and NAFA Private Equity

What they do

JetSynthesys is a Pune-based digital entertainment holding company that builds and buys mobile games, esports properties, regional-language music distribution and a handful of wellness and fintech side bets, then sells advertising, in-app purchases, licensing fees and content deals against the audiences those properties attract. Its best-known consumer product has been Real Cricket, a mobile cricket-simulation franchise that at one point claimed more than 100 million downloads and over 10 million monthly active users, made by its former subsidiary Nautilus Mobile (PRNewswire, October 2020). Around that core sit a cricket content platform co-owned with Sachin Tendulkar (100MB), an esports operator (Jet Skyesports), a regional-music distribution arm (Global Music Junction), a mental-wellness app (ThinkRight.me), a video-blogging platform with Amitabh Bachchan as a minority investor (Wakau), and a fintech lending joint venture with Adar Poonawalla (AnyDay Money) (Forbes India, November 2020). The customer, in every case, is India’s smartphone-first, largely non-English-speaking mass market — not the premium gaming or streaming audience most global platforms chase.

The origin

Rajan Navani did not start out building games. He trained as an imaging engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the mid-1990s after an electrical-engineering master’s at Purdue, then returned to run his family’s Jetline Group, a trading and distribution business with roots in Thailand dating to the 1930s and a presence in India since 1974 (Forbes India, November 2020). His first entrepreneurial venture, a laser-disc partnership with Japan’s Pioneer in Thailand, briefly made the country the world’s third-largest laser-disc market by 1997 — the same year the Asian financial crisis wiped it out. Navani has called it the moment he first saw failure up close (Forbes India, November 2020).

That experience shaped how he approached India’s smartphone boom after 2011. Rather than guess at a single product, he commissioned McKinsey to study what actually drove mobile engagement among Indian users, and the answer became JetSynthesys’s founding thesis in 2014: what insiders called the “ABCD” formula — astrology, Bollywood, cricket and devotion, the four things that reliably pulled first-time smartphone users into an app (Forbes India, November 2020). Cricket is the one pillar that survived and came to define the company; the others were cut, softened or replaced as India’s content rules and user habits shifted.

The struggle years

JetSynthesys’s near-misses are not confined to its founder’s pre-history, though that one set the tone. Two later setbacks, both dated and both disclosed, show a company that has had to keep rewriting its own model.

The turning point

The clearest inflection in JetSynthesys’s numbers is not a product launch. It is a sale. In March 2025, Krafton — the Korean publisher of PUBG — paid $14 million to take a controlling stake, reported at north of 75%, in Nautilus Mobile, the Real Cricket maker JetSynthesys had owned outright since 2020 (TechCrunch, March 2025). Krafton had first bought a minority piece of Nautilus for $5.4 million back in 2022; this deal flipped it from strategic investor to controlling shareholder, with JetSynthesys stepping down to a minority holder (TechCrunch, March 2025).

The effect on JetSynthesys’s own books was immediate and large. The RoC filings for FY25 show a ₹164.8 crore gain from the sale of current investments tied to that transaction — a figure bigger than the company’s entire FY24 revenue base swing, and the single reason the group’s bottom line flipped from a ₹97.5 crore net loss in FY24 to a ₹14.4 crore net profit in FY25, even as the underlying business still ran an EBITDA loss of ₹107.8 crore that year (Entrackr, November 2025; BW Disrupt, November 2025). Before: a decade-old flagship game franchise, wholly owned, losing money at the group level. After: a minority stake in that same franchise, a large cash-and-accounting gain, and a headline profit that depended on it.

The money behind it

JetSynthesys has been capitalised less like a venture-backed startup racing to a Series round and more like a family-office project that gradually opened its cap table to strategic and institutional money.

Company leadership has said the April 2025 round is meant to support a listing within 18 to 36 months, i.e., roughly by late 2026 to 2028, as profitability and global scale build (The Week, April 2025). No draft prospectus had been filed with India’s markets regulator as of September 2026.

How it makes money

JetSynthesys’s revenue comes from running and licensing digital entertainment products rather than from any single toll-gate business model, and the company does not publish a segment-wise revenue split (Entrackr, November 2025). What is disclosed is the cost side, which shows where the money actually goes:

The part outsiders get wrong is treating JetSynthesys as a single gaming company with a gaming company’s economics. It is closer to a portfolio manager of digital-entertainment bets — games, music rights, esports events, a wellness subscription app, a lending joint venture — each with its own take rate, cost structure and investor set, consolidated into one holding company’s accounts. That is also why one subsidiary’s stake sale can single-handedly swing the group’s reported profitability.

The numbers

Consistent, comparable figures are only available for a limited run of years; earlier-year numbers reported by different data aggregators do not reconcile with the RoC-filed figures below, so they are excluded rather than blended. Unit: ₹ crore.

Year Revenue EBITDA Net profit / (loss)
FY20 (year to March 2020) 137 10.8 Not separately disclosed
FY24 (year to March 2024) 188.9 Not separately disclosed (97.5)
FY25 (year to March 2025) 207.6 (107.8) 14.4

Where the money comes from

JetSynthesys does not publish a revenue-by-segment or revenue-by-geography table, so no percentage split can be stated with confidence — a gap worth naming plainly rather than papering over. What is verifiable is the shape of the portfolio generating that revenue:

The surprise is less about geography and more about which asset a “gaming company” chose to sell down first: not a struggling side bet, but Real Cricket and Nautilus Mobile, its most recognisable and longest-held consumer franchise — traded for cash and a large one-time accounting gain rather than scaled further in-house.

The risks

The takeaway

JetSynthesys’s two decades of pivots — from laser discs to astrology apps to cricket games to regional music to fintech — read less like strategic focus and more like a founder with patient, aligned capital giving himself permission to be wrong about most of his bets, as long as one of them eventually works. That only holds together because the backers underwriting it, a family office and its network, have a time horizon long enough to absorb an 18-month regulatory shutdown here or a near decade of thin margins there. The transferable lesson is not “diversify everything.” It is that the shape of a founder’s capital — patient, aligned, willing to wait — is often what actually permits the pivoting, long before any single product proves it was the right one.

Frequently asked questions

What does JetSynthesys do?

It is a Pune-based digital entertainment company that builds and licenses mobile games, runs esports events, distributes regional-language music, and operates a handful of wellness and fintech side businesses, monetising through in-app purchases, advertising, event revenue and licensing fees (Forbes India, November 2020; Entrackr, November 2025).

Who founded JetSynthesys, and when?

Rajan Navani, a former NASA imaging engineer who took over his family’s Jetline Group, launched JetSynthesys in 2014 after commissioning McKinsey to study what drove mobile engagement in India; the corporate entity was incorporated in 2012 (Forbes India, November 2020).

Is JetSynthesys profitable?

It reported a net profit of ₹14.4 crore in FY25, but that came almost entirely from a ₹164.8 crore gain on selling down its stake in Nautilus Mobile to Krafton; the underlying business still ran an EBITDA loss of ₹107.8 crore that year (Entrackr, November 2025; BW Disrupt, November 2025).

Who are JetSynthesys’s biggest backers?

Adar Poonawalla’s Pratithi Investments and the Serum Institute family office, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, the promoter Jetline Group, and, since April 2025, Krafton and NAFA Private Equity (Forbes India, November 2020; YourStory, April 2025).

Will JetSynthesys go public?

The company said in April 2025 it is targeting a stock-market listing within 18 to 36 months as profitability and global scale build, but no draft prospectus had been filed with India’s markets regulator as of September 2026 (The Week, April 2025).

Sources

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

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