Startup Deep Dive : MPL — how a 28% GST and a national ban ended real-money gaming for an Indian unicorn

Mobile Premier League spent seven years building one of India’s two gaming unicorns, reaching a $2.3 billion valuation in September 2021 on the back of fantasy sports, rummy and poker. In August 2025, a new law made that entire product illegal in India overnight — and MPL had already lived through a smaller version of this collapse once before.

Both times, the company’s answer was to cut, not to fight. It let go of 350 employees in August 2023 when the government imposed a 28% GST on real-money games. It let go of roughly 300 more in August 2025 when Parliament banned real-money games altogether. What survives is a smaller company that no longer takes a single rupee of stake money in India, and now earns most of its revenue from free-to-play titles in Europe and paid games in the United States instead.

Quick facts

What they do

MPL is a mobile gaming app built by Galactus Funware Technology, offering dozens of casual, sports and skill-based games to players in India, Europe, the United States and Brazil. Until August 2025 its Indian business ran on real money: users deposited cash, entered paid contests in fantasy cricket, rummy and poker, and MPL kept a cut of the entry pool as a platform fee. Since the Indian ban, the India app runs only free-to-play formats — casual games, esports-style contests and virtual rewards — while paid, real-stakes play continues in markets such as the United States and Brazil, and a separate free-to-play studio, GameDuell in Germany, serves European users. The common thread across all of it is the same: a mobile-first games marketplace, monetised through a mix of entry fees, in-app purchases and advertising, depending on what each market’s law allows.

The origin

Co-founders Sai Srinivas Kiran G and Shubham Malhotra were not new to Indian startups when they registered Galactus Funware Technology in Bengaluru in September 2018. The pair had already built and sold one company together: Creo, maker of the Teewe HDMI streaming stick, which they founded in 2014 and which was acquired by Hike Messenger in 2017, as reported by StartupTalky and werisebyliftingothers. Srinivas, an IIT Kanpur aeronautical engineering graduate, had worked as an associate product manager at Zynga and then as director of product at Bharti Softbank before that. Malhotra studied electronics and instrumentation at BITS Pilani. Their founding insight for MPL was straightforward: India had cheap data, a smartphone base that was exploding, and almost no organised market for skill-based mobile gaming with real prizes. Sequoia Capital India backed that bet within two months of incorporation, leading a funding round in November 2018, according to The Indian Wire.

The struggle years

MPL’s growth years were not free of retreat. In 2022 it exited Indonesia, one of its early international bets, as part of a broader cost-reduction push, per Wikipedia’s company summary of that period. In December 2023 it shut Striker, its web3-based fantasy platform, as it pulled back from a crypto-gaming experiment amid regulatory uncertainty and legal challenges around the category, as reported by Entrackr’s Fintrackr in its FY24 financial review.

The bigger blow landed in mid-2023. On 8 August 2023, MPL laid off 350 employees — about half its India headcount at the time — after the GST Council reclassified real-money games alongside gambling and betting for tax purposes, applying a 28% levy on user deposits rather than on the platform’s revenue or margin. CEO Sai Srinivas told staff in an internal memo, reported by Business Standard, Entrackr and Medianama, that the new tax structure would increase MPL’s tax burden by 350–400%, and that “tough decisions” were unavoidable. Losses that followed were steep: Rs 309.3 crore in FY23, widening to Rs 374.9 crore in FY24, according to Entrackr’s Fintrackr filings-based reporting.

The turning point

The defining event, however, arrived two years later. On 20 August 2025, India’s Lok Sabha passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025; the Rajya Sabha approved it the next day, and it was signed into law days after, per TechCrunch and Law.asia’s coverage of the Act. The law did something the 2023 GST hike had not: it banned all online games played for money, regardless of whether they were classified as games of skill or chance, with criminal penalties of up to two years in prison and fines of up to Rs 5 million for operators who continued.

MPL’s response was immediate. Within hours of the Rajya Sabha vote, the company suspended all real-money games in India and stopped accepting new deposits. An in-app notice, quoted by TechCrunch, told users that “deposit cash (minus GST) will be available for withdrawal from 22 Aug. 2025.” Ten days later, on 31 August 2025, Srinivas emailed staff that the company would be “downsizing our India team significantly,” cutting roughly 300 of its approximately 500 India employees — about 60% of that office — across marketing, finance, operations, engineering and legal, as reported by BusinessToday, India TV News and Reuters (via Yahoo Finance). Srinivas told Reuters that India had accounted for roughly half of M-League’s global revenue, worth an estimated $100 million the previous year, and that the company would “no longer be making any revenue from India in the near future.” On one side of that turning point sat an India business worth roughly half of group revenue; on the other, zero real-money revenue from the country MPL was built in.

The money behind it

MPL has raised about $401 million across eleven rounds since 2018, according to data platform Tracxn. Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) led the first institutional round in November 2018 and stayed on as the company scaled, giving MPL early credibility with later-stage investors. SIG, MDI and RTP Global led a $90 million Series C in September 2020, per Businesswire’s release at the time, funding the app’s expansion into new game categories ahead of the pandemic-era mobile gaming boom. The defining round came in September 2021: a $150 million Series E led by Legatum Capital, with Sequoia, SIG, RTP Global, Go-Ventures, Moore Strategic Ventures, Play Ventures, Base Partners, Telstra Ventures and Founders Circle Capital all participating, pushing the valuation to $2.3 billion and making MPL India’s second gaming unicorn, as reported by GamesBeat, Esports Insider and FinSMEs. That capital funded aggressive customer acquisition and international entry into Europe, the US and, briefly, Indonesia.

The company has raised smaller, defensive rounds since, including a $5.41 million round in February 2025 led by Spartan Group, per Tracxn, whose data also puts MPL’s valuation at roughly $1.45 billion as of that round — about 37% below its 2021 peak. MPL does not publicly confirm valuation figures, so this should be read as a data-provider estimate rather than a disclosed number, and no valuation specific to after the August 2025 ban has been publicly reported by either the company or its investors as of this writing.

How it makes money

Before the 2025 ban, MPL’s Indian business worked like most real-money fantasy and card-game platforms: users deposited cash into an in-app wallet, paid an entry fee into a contest pool, and MPL retained a platform fee — commonly cited in industry estimates at roughly 8–12% of the entry pool, lower than the 10–15% cited for market leader Dream11 — before distributing the rest as winnings. The rest came from advertising and sponsorships layered on top of the game experience. Costs ran heavy on user acquisition: in FY24, advertising and promotional spending was Rs 442.97 crore, or 31.8% of total expenditure, and in FY25 that figure was reported at about $70 million, or 42% of total costs, according to Entrackr’s Fintrackr. That is the part people tend to get wrong about “gaming unicorns” like MPL: the margin was never really in the games. It was in how cheaply the company could buy a paying depositor relative to how much that depositor staked over their lifetime — a formula that the 28% GST directly broke by taxing deposits rather than revenue, and one the 2025 law erased entirely for India. Post-ban, the India product runs on the more conventional free-to-play playbook: in-app purchases, cosmetic items and ads, alongside continuing real-money operations in jurisdictions like the US and Brazil where such games remain legal.

The numbers

Figures below are for Galactus Funware Technology / M-League on a consolidated basis, as reported by Entrackr’s Fintrackr and Inc42 from company filings. All figures in Rs crore.

Revenue grew about 22.2% from FY23 to FY24 and over 30% from FY24 to FY25, even as the company absorbed the 2023 GST shock and prepared for a shrinking India franchise. FY24’s wider loss was driven largely by a Rs 92.93 crore fair-value loss on financial instruments rather than operations — stripped of that, Entrackr estimated an adjusted loss closer to Rs 282 crore. FY25 marked MPL’s first profitable year at the group level, with an EBITDA margin of about 2.45%, helped by employee costs falling roughly 20.5% to Rs 364 crore even as revenue grew — a sign the company was already trimming for the leaner, post-ban structure before the ban formally arrived in August 2025 (a month outside the FY25 reporting window, which closed in March 2025).

Where the money comes from

The geographic mix shifted sharply and quickly. In FY24, India still supplied 69% of MPL’s revenue (Rs 737.1 crore), with Europe at 27.9% (Rs 298.1 crore), the US at 2.6% and Nigeria a new 0.5% sliver, per Entrackr’s Fintrackr breakdown of that year’s filings. By FY25, India’s share had fallen to roughly 60% of revenue, with overseas markets contributing Rs 560 crore — and within that, GameDuell, MPL’s German free-to-play studio, alone generated about $60 million, up 64% year-on-year. The surprise, given MPL’s reputation as an Indian real-money gaming company, is how much of its recent growth was already coming from a free-to-play European studio and not from Indian stake money — which is precisely the business the company leaned on harder once the ban made the India real-money segment worth zero.

The risks

Three risks stand out, all of them already partly realised rather than hypothetical. First, concentrated regulatory risk in India: the 2025 Act does not merely tax or restrict real-money gaming, it criminalises it outright, and MPL has no path back into that segment domestically without a change in national law. Second, revenue-base risk: with India’s real-money contribution reduced to zero and free-to-play India revenue typically monetising far below real-money India revenue per user, MPL must replace roughly half its pre-ban global revenue through the US, Brazil and European free-to-play growth, markets where it competes against larger, better-capitalised gaming companies. Third, profitability is still fragile: FY25’s Rs 36.5 crore profit and 2.45% EBITDA margin followed two straight years of losses and came before the 2025 ban’s cost of India layoffs and lost India revenue was reflected in the accounts, meaning the true post-ban run-rate is not yet visible in any published filing.

The takeaway

MPL’s history argues for treating “regulatory risk” as a line item, not a footnote, whenever a business’s core revenue depends on a government’s tolerance rather than a settled law. The company was profitable enough, well-funded enough and diversified enough by market to survive both the 2023 GST shock and the 2025 ban outright — but survival meant giving up, twice, the product line that had made it a unicorn in the first place. The lesson for any founder building on regulatory permission rather than a clear legal right: build the exit into the plan before the ban forces it.

Frequently asked questions

Is MPL still operating in India?

Yes, but only its free-to-play games. MPL suspended all real-money fantasy sports, rummy and poker in India from 21 August 2025, when the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 banned all online games played for money nationwide, as reported by TechCrunch and Law.asia.

Why did MPL lay off staff twice?

In August 2023, it cut 350 jobs — about half its India headcount — after a 28% GST was imposed on user deposits in real-money games, which its CEO said increased MPL’s tax burden by 350–400%. In August 2025, it cut roughly 300 more India employees after the national ban eliminated its real-money revenue in the country, per BusinessToday and Reuters.

What is MPL worth today?

MPL’s last reported valuation is about $1.45 billion, tied to a small February 2025 funding round led by Spartan Group, according to data platform Tracxn — down from its $2.3 billion peak in September 2021. This is not a figure MPL has confirmed publicly, and no valuation specific to the period after the August 2025 ban has been reported.

Who owns MPL?

MPL is operated by Galactus Funware Technology Pvt Ltd, co-founded and led by CEO Sai Srinivas Kiran G alongside Shubham Malhotra. Investors include Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), SIG, RTP Global, Legatum Capital, Times Internet and Go-Ventures, among roughly 75 investors across its funding history, per Tracxn.

How did MPL make money before the ban?

Users deposited cash and paid entry fees into contests such as fantasy cricket, rummy and poker; MPL kept a platform fee, estimated in industry reporting at roughly 8–12% of the entry pool, before distributing the remainder as winnings, supplemented by advertising revenue.

Sources

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

• TechCrunch, “As India bans real-money games, Dream Sports, MPL start pulling the plug,” August 2025
• Law.asia, “India’s new gaming law bans real-money play,” September 2025
• BusinessToday, “MPL to layoff 300 employees in India as new law bans real money gaming,” August 2025
• India TV News, “MPL to layoff 60 per cent workforce after India bans paid online games,” September 2025
• Reuters via Yahoo Finance, “India’s MPL to sack 60% of local staff after paid gaming ban, source says,” September 2025
• Medianama, “MPL to lay off 350 employees owing to the 28% GST levy,” August 2023
• Entrackr, “MPL lays off 350 employees amid no respite from GST on real-money games,” August 2023
• Business Standard, “MPL to lay off 350 employees after 28% GST imposed on online gaming,” August 2023
• Entrackr Fintrackr, “MPL turns operating cash flow positive with Rs 157 Cr in FY24,” 2024
• Entrackr Fintrackr, “M League earns Rs 560 Cr from overseas in FY25, turns profitable,” 2025
• Inc42, “MPL Parent M-League’s FY24 Revenue Jumps 22% To $128 Mn,” 2024
• GamesBeat, “Mobile Premier League raises $150M at $2.3B valuation for mobile esports,” September 2021
• Esports Insider, “Mobile Premier League valued at $2.3bn after funding round,” September 2021
• FinSMEs, “Mobile Premier League Raises Series E Financing; Valued at $2.3 Billion,” September 2021
• Businesswire, “MPL Raises $90 Million in Series C Funding Led by SIG, MDI and RTP,” September 2020
• The Indian Wire, “Creo Founders’ e-sports gaming startup MPL raises ₹36.5 crore in series A,” 2018
• StartupTalky, “Mobile Premier League | Founders | Business Model | Funding | Revenue”
• Tracxn, “MPL — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Mobile Premier League,” accessed September 2026

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