While IPL media rights plateau and FIFA struggles to find a broadcast partner in India, one Pune startup is quietly solving a completely different problem — making live sports streaming affordable for everyone else
The economics of elite sports broadcasting are starting to crack. IPL media rights are unlikely to climb beyond their last valuation of $5.4 billion. FIFA is still hunting for a broadcast partner in India weeks before the World Cup kicks off. The English Premier League is facing questions about whether its peak is behind it.
But zoom out from the glamour of top-tier sports, and a completely different story is unfolding — one where millions of grassroots tournaments, school competitions, and amateur leagues happen every weekend with zero broadcast coverage, zero digital footprint, and zero way for athletes to be discovered.
That’s the gap SportVot is building into.
The Idea That Almost Didn’t Survive
Founded in 2019 by Sidhhant Agarwal, Shubhangi Gupta, and Yash Bhagwatkar, SportVot set out to build a talent discovery platform for sports. The timing was catastrophic. Within four months of launch, Covid-19 brought organised sports to a complete standstill worldwide.
Rather than shut down, the team improvised. They pivoted their streaming infrastructure to help mandals and religious organisations stream bhajans with lyrics overlaid on screen. They worked with political parties to broadcast rallies. Unglamorous, but it kept the lights on — and more importantly, it sharpened their understanding of live streaming at scale.
A stint at Startupbootcamp’s Melbourne-based sports tech accelerator helped them stay afloat and fine-tune the product further. By early 2022, when sports returned to normal, SportVot came back with a cleaner, more battle-tested solution.
Agarwal had been here before. After graduating from the University of Mumbai with an electronics and telecommunication engineering degree, he spent time at Oracle and fintech startup CashCare before founding his first venture — ThisGameWeek, a fantasy football platform. Nazara Technologies eventually acquired its licence and distributed it across multiple countries, giving Agarwal both an exit and a ringside view of how sports tech scales.
SportVot was his second act — and a more ambitious one.
What SportVot Actually Does
The pitch is straightforward: professional-grade live sports streaming, without the professional-grade price tag.
“Earlier, broadcast or video production or streaming was very elite. The cost structure would never make it a viable option for any average tournament organiser to even think about. What we do is simplify video capture through automation and reduce its cost,” Agarwal explained.
SportVot operates as a white-label OTT solution that handles the entire production stack — camera setup, graphics (scoreboards, player identification, substitutions), remote commentary from its network of commentators, sponsor and advertisement cues, post-match highlight generation, and streaming distribution.
Customers choose their level of involvement. A tournament organiser can have SportVot send a technician to install and manage everything on-site. Or they can use their own smartphone and plug into SportVot’s software layer. Most organisers running large-format sports like cricket and football opt for the full-service package.
For those in between, automated cameras from SportVot’s hardware partners track on-field action without requiring a human operator. Cloud infrastructure handles remote production direction for those who want a polished, broadcast-quality output.
Pricing follows a rental model — all-inclusive per game or per competition, covering cameras, equipment, software, and production. Long-term clients can subscribe for a set number of games over a period. The distribution destination is flexible too — YouTube, the organiser’s own website, or SportVot’s in-house platform, which the company uses selectively for sports like kabaddi where it has built its own audience base.
Who’s Using It — and Where
SportVot’s client list spans geographies and scales. In India, Reliance Foundation Youth Sports is among its marquee customers. Internationally, SuperSport Schools in South Africa uses the platform, along with tournament organisers across Portugal, Israel, and the United States.
Global partnerships with camera manufacturers like Israel-based Pixellot help SportVot reach customers it wouldn’t find through direct sales — hardware buyers who get SportVot’s software bundled in.
The startup has streamed across 35-plus sports, with kabaddi, football, and cricket dominating in India, and rugby and football leading internationally. More recently, padel and pickleball have emerged as fast-growing categories.
In FY26, SportVot streamed around 100,000 matches. Revenue for the year came in at approximately ₹19 crore, and the company is targeting at least a doubling of that in FY27.
To date, it has raised ₹40 crore from investors including IAN Alpha Fund (which led its most recent ₹32.7 crore round), Anicut Capital, LetsVenture, Capital A, Omidyar Network, and Ankur Capital.
The Problem No Startup Can Fully Solve
SportVot’s biggest challenge isn’t internal. It’s the state of sports infrastructure in India.
“A lot of what we’ve built will completely fail if the venue where we deploy the cameras and software is not able to support it, and this happens 5–7% of the time after doing everything right. The baseline infrastructure at many of the venues is terrible, especially in India when compared to countries like Portugal and the US,” Agarwal said plainly.
The workarounds that have emerged from this are equal parts inspiring and sobering. At the Brahmaputra Volleyball League in Assam, matches are held in districts so remote that e-commerce deliveries don’t reach. Organisers built their own camera tripods out of bamboo sticks and used plastic bottles as stabilisers. Where internet connectivity failed, they brought in 5G dongles.
“These guys innovate so much, but the infrastructure challenges are real. Not every venue is well-equipped like an IPL stadium,” Agarwal noted.
Profitability remains a work in progress. SportVot hasn’t crossed that line yet, and the infrastructure ceiling in India is a genuine constraint on how fast it can get there.
The Bigger Bet
SportVot is operating on a thesis that cuts against the grain of where most sports media investment flows: that the future of sports streaming isn’t at the top of the pyramid — it’s at the base.
India’s sports tech market is projected to surpass $3.5 billion by 2027, and SportVot competes in that space alongside CricHeroes, FanCode, and Stupa Sports Analytics. But its specific wedge — infrastructure-level tooling for the organisers that mainstream platforms ignore — is one that few are genuinely addressing.
The bamboo tripod story says everything about both the scale of the opportunity and the distance left to travel. The demand is real and widespread. The will to participate is clearly there. What’s missing is the infrastructure layer that makes professional-quality streaming possible regardless of whether you’re at an IPL ground or a district-level kabaddi field in Assam.
SportVot is trying to be that layer. Whether India’s sports ecosystem builds up to meet it — or whether SportVot has to keep improvising around it — will define the next chapter.
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