Indian gaming and interactive-media teams are building products that can travel well beyond the country, and Ventana Ventures is backing them at the seed stage, with specialist support that goes beyond the first cheque. In this edition of Fund in Focus, Shylaja Rao, Founding General Partner, Ventana Ventures, discusses why India’s gaming founders need specialist investors, what connects studios, motion gaming, sports-tech and children’s interactive experiences in Ventana’s portfolio, and what the fund’s first exit, SportVot, taught it about liquidity. She also shares her views on how the Online Gaming Bill, 2025 has reshaped the sector, the role of global ambition in building Indian gaming companies, and where the next wave of value will emerge across new IP, gaming infrastructure and AI-native experiences.
FUND IN FOCUS: Ventana Ventures’ Shylaja Rao on Backing India’s Gaming Founders from First Cheque to Global Audiences
Shylaja Rao, Founding General Partner, Ventana Ventures
Spokesperson: Shylaja Rao, Founding General Partner, Ventana Ventures
1. What led you to launch Ventana Ventures as a fund focused specifically on gaming and interactive media, and what opportunity did you see in the Indian market?
India has a huge gaming audience, but when we looked at who was funding early-stage companies, most of the capital was either generalist or chasing a handful of big categories. Almost nobody was sitting down with a studio founder to talk about retention, IP, or how a game earns money over time. That is a specialist conversation, and founders were having it with people who did not speak the language. Having spent two decades in gaming ourselves, we speak that language and can discuss retention, IP and monetisation as operators, not just as financiers.
The talent was clearly there too. Indian studios and interactive teams were building things that could travel well beyond the country, often on very thin budgets. We felt a dedicated fund could do two things: write the first cheque early and be genuinely useful to the founder after that. Ventana came out of that gap.
2. Your portfolio spans game studios, sports-tech, motion gaming and other interactive experiences. What connects these investments, and how broadly do you define Ventana’s investment universe?
Our portfolio spans a range of formats, but the underlying thread is consistent: we back products that people choose to return to. It includes indie studios, motion-gaming and console-style titles, sports-tech platforms, and interactive experiences for children. The formats differ, but the investment test does not.
Every company is assessed against three questions. Do users return without being prompted? Is there a source of compounding advantage, whether IP, community, or data, that competitors cannot easily replicate? And does the team have a genuine edge in building it?
This also defines how broadly we look. We focus on user behaviour, not genre or platform, so any company that meets this standard is within our scope, whether it is a console-style game or a motion-sensing application.
3. Ventana has maintained a concentrated portfolio in Fund I. How do you think about portfolio construction, follow-on capital and ownership as companies progress beyond the seed stage?
Fund I is concentrated on purpose. At seed stage you learn the most in the first year after investing, and you can only be useful if you have the time to be. Spreading across too many names makes that hard.
We keep capital aside for follow-ons, because the companies that start working are the ones where you want to hold your ownership. A good outcome with a diluted stake is quite a different return from the same outcome with a protected one. That said, we do not follow on automatically. A follow-on has to be earned by the numbers, not by the fact that we are already on the cap table. And we are realistic that beyond a certain round size we will be one of many investors, so our job shifts to helping the company bring in the right ones.
4. Ventana recently marked its first exit, with SportVot generating a 2.47x MOIC via a secondary sale to IAN Alpha Fund. What did that journey teach you about what a credible exit path looks like for early-stage gaming and sports-tech bets in India, where M&A and IPO precedents are still thin?
The honest answer is that exits in this space do not follow a template yet. There are not many acquisitions of gaming or sports-tech companies at meaningful prices, and a listing is a long way off for most. So you must be creative about what a good exit looks like. SportVot returned us a decent multiple through a secondary sale to IAN Alpha Fund, which shows one real route: a later-stage investor with the appetite to take over from early backers.
What we took from it is that you prepare for an exit from day one. That means clean books, a tidy cap table, proper governance, and numbers that hold up under diligence. Even a secondary buyer is paying for confidence, and companies that are easy to diligence are the ones that get to a close faster. We also learned to start the liquidity conversation with founders earlier than feels natural, so nobody is surprised when the time comes.
5. Your portfolio spans indie game studios like Brewed Games, motion-gaming and sports-tech platforms like MetaShot and SportVot, and interactive experiences for children. How do you define the category you actually invest in, and what connects these bets beyond the umbrella term “gaming”?
“Gaming” is too narrow a term for what we do. Brewed Games, Qila Games and Norian Games are each independent game studios, 1312 Interactive is a PC publishing platform, and MetaShot and SportVot operate in motion gaming and sports-tech. We have also backed interactive experiences for children through Wippi and Plazmo. They may appear quite different from the outside, but they share one defining characteristic: the user is an active participant, not a passive viewer.
We therefore describe our category as interactive entertainment built around repeat engagement. Our assessment rests on user behaviour: whether people return, whether they bring others with them, and whether they continue to invest their time or money over the long term. On these measures, a children’s learning experience and a mobile game can have more in common than two games from different genres.
6. Ventana recently recorded its first exit through SportVot. What did that experience teach you about liquidity and exit opportunities for early-stage gaming and sports-tech investments in India?
SportVot showed us that liquidity in this segment can come from places other than a trade sale or a listing. Secondary markets are starting to matter. More funds want to buy into companies that are past the riskiest phase, and that gives early investors a way out without waiting for one big event.
It also reminded us that liquidity is partly about timing and patience. You cannot force it. What you can do is keep the company in decent shape so that an opportunity can be taken when it shows up. As the ecosystem matures, we would expect more strategic buyers, more late-stage funds and eventually listings to join the picture. For now, we plan for several possible routes, not one.
7. Companies such as Brewed Games and MetaShot are building products with the potential to reach markets beyond India. How important is global scalability when Ventana evaluates an investment?
It matters a lot, but we see it as a direction, not a day-one requirement. Many of our portfolio companies are building something that can work outside India, and that is part of what interested us. A product that can find users in other markets has a much higher ceiling than one that depends on a single country.
At the same time, we do not want founders rushing abroad before they have something working at home. We prefer a team that has a strong starting market, learns from it, and then expands with evidence. India gives them a large base to test on, and good engineering and design talent at costs that let them go further on less money. We look for that mix: a solid base at home and a product that does not need to be rebuilt to travel.
8. India’s Online Gaming Bill, 2025 wiped out the real-money gaming segment almost overnight, along with years of VC capital tied to it. Ventana never touched that segment. Does the ban validate your original thesis of steering clear of RMG in favour of IP-led, skill-based and sports-tech gaming, and are you now seeing capital or founder talent that would have gone into RMG start looking at the categories you back instead?
We never invested in real-money gaming, so we were not directly exposed when the Bill came. However, a lot of founders’ and investors’ sentiments were hurt, people lost jobs, and it was a hard period for the sector.
What it does confirm is something we believed from the start: when a business depends on a regulatory position that can change quickly, the risk sits squarely with the investor. We preferred companies where the value is in the IP, the skill, the community, or the sports experience, not in a mechanism that a law could shut down.
On what is happening now, yes, we are seeing more conversations with founders and teams who would earlier have gone towards real-money formats. Some are rethinking what they build, and some of the talent, whether product, engineering or data, is looking at IP-led games, sports-tech, and other categories we back. Capital is more cautious in general, and regulatory clarity is now one of the first things investors ask about.
9. Beyond capital, how does Ventana work with portfolio founders during the early stages of building their companies? Are there particular areas where founders in gaming tend to need the most support?
In the early days, a lot of what founders need is a sounding board and a few well-timed introductions. Beyond that, the areas where gaming founders ask for help most are monetisation and pricing, user acquisition costs, publishing and distribution relationships, senior hiring, and getting ready for the next round. Having built and operated in this industry for two decades, we have seen these problems first-hand and can often help founders avoid the mistakes that cost time and money.
We also help with the less glamorous side: finance, compliance, reporting, and governance. Many first-time founders are strong on product and have not had to think about these things, and it shows up later in diligence. Our team sits with them from the early days, so these gaps are closed well before diligence.
We try to be present without being in the way. The founder runs the company, and we are there when they want a second opinion.
10. Over the next three to five years, where do you see the strongest opportunities emerging across gaming and interactive media, and how do you expect Ventana’s investment strategy to evolve alongside them?
We think the next few years will favour teams that build original IP and can reach global audiences, and teams that use innovative technology well. Sports-tech and motion gaming have room to grow, because India loves its sport and there is real interest in more active, participatory formats. AI is making it cheaper and quicker to build and test, which should mean more small teams producing excellent work.
For Ventana, we plan to stay at seed stage and keep the same discipline. Our approach will adapt, with more attention to AI-driven products and to categories that sit between gaming, consumer, education, or sports. We will keep avoiding anything that depends on fragile regulation, and we will keep the portfolio focused enough that we can be of real help to each company.
11. Looking three to five years out, where do you see the next big wave of Indian gaming and interactive-media value creation coming from, new IP and studios, sports-tech and motion gaming, AI-native gaming experiences, or something not yet on most investors’ radar?
If we had to pick, we would say the wave will come from where these overlap, more than from any one of them. New Indian IP is the one we feel strongest about. We have stories, characters and cultural references that have not been used much, and global audiences are open to them. Studios that build and own that IP can create value over a long time, in games and in other formats too.
Beneath the games themselves, we also see real opportunity in gaming infrastructure: the publishing and distribution platforms, tools, analytics, and live-operations layers that every studio needs and few want to build alone. As the number of Indian studios grows, the companies that make it easier and cheaper to build, launch, and run a game will become increasingly important.
AI-native experiences are moving fastest: characters that respond to the player, content that adapts, tools that let a small team do the work of a much larger one. It is early and a lot of it will be noise, but some of it will stick. Sports-tech and motion gaming have a different advantage, which is that they bring in people who do not think of themselves as gamers at all.
The area we would watch, and which may not be on many radars yet, is interactive products for families and children, where learning, play and parental involvement come together. Whoever earns trust and engagement in that space will have a large and loyal audience.