Salone Sehgal Raised $100M for Lumikai While Everyone Told Her Indians Don't Pay for Digital
Six years on, India's interactive media market is $13.8 billion. The Lumikai founder on microdramas, the DAU farm myth, and knowing when to shut your own company down.
The investor worth listening to is not the one who was right. It is the one who was right when being right was socially expensive.
In early 2020, Salone Sehgal was raising a first-time, sector-focused fund for interactive media in India. Over Zoom, because there were no roadshows. Against a consensus that arrived pre-argued.
When I was incepting the fund, I heard every version of it. Indians don’t pay. Sector-focused strategies don’t lead to exits. There is no talent. India’s a DAU farm. I heard every version of this from literally every corner of the world.
DAU farm. Daily active users. India as a supplier of cheap, unmonetisable headcount so a foreign platform could put a bigger number on a slide.
She raised $40 million anyway. Lumikai now runs north of $100 million across two funds.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The mispricing was in the diagnosis, not the data
The consensus had its numbers right. Indian users genuinely were not paying. Everyone read that as low willingness. Salone read it as high friction.
It was not so much about an innate unwillingness to spend. There was an inability to spend.
One word, a country-sized consequence. You cannot fix culture with a product roadmap, but infrastructure gets built. Jio cut data tariffs by over 90% in 2016 and 2017. Entry-level phones got processors capable of real-time multiplayer. Then UPI made a ₹10 transaction frictionless, solving what credit card penetration never would.
So when $13.8 billion sounds small, check the denominator. D2C sits on three decades of physical consumption behaviour. Interactive media sits on roughly five years of plumbing, and is already growing 17% a year on 877 million smartphone users.
Salone read the content curve off satellite TV in the 1990s: the pipe first, imported shows next, and only five or six years later Balaji, Zee and Hum Paanch. Her rule on timing that gap:
It is better to be early, but not the only, because if you are the only, you have to ask yourself why. If it is obvious, you are probably too late.
The failure that qualified her
Between 2013 and 2017, Salone ran TrulySocial in London, a narrative mobile world for female audiences, on $3 to $4 million raised. A strategic partner reshuffled its team and pulled a $5 million financing line. Then, with an acquisition nearly closed, the board vetoed it. Two months of runway.
Startups don’t fail in neat PowerPoint ways. They fail in messy ways. They fail slowly. They fail emotionally, operationally, legally, financially.
What she did next is why she is an investor today. Every salary paid, every vendor cleared, every employee placed in a new job before the runway ended, including one expecting a child. Then a debrief on what they had learned. She cites Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets: knowing when to take your chips off the table is a skill that hustle culture keeps mislabelling as weakness.
Her seed investors watched her close a company well, then hired her to invest their money.
The proof arrived faster than the thesis
Lumikai backed Eloelo in 2021 as a live social streaming platform. In June 2025 the group launched microdrama app Story TV, with Balaji Telefilms, Zee and Applause Entertainment supplying content. Group ARR went from roughly $23 million that month to about $230 million by January 2026. It turned cash positive in October and has appointed Avendus to raise upwards of $50 million.
Look at what TikTok did to social media, and what hypercasual did to casual games. Microdramas have done that to content and OTT. It is essentially OTT on steroids.
The category matches the company: $300 million in India in year one, 450 million downloads, 100 million monthly actives, projected to $4.5 billion by 2030. Elsewhere, Zoop grew sellers 300% by building tooling for the women already running businesses on Facebook Marketplace rather than chasing buyers. Loco exited in 2024 past 52 million users, answering the “sector funds don’t produce exits” objection.
The mechanics: 60% of dry powder into first cheques, 40% reserved. Seed cheques of $500,000 to $2 million, sized for 24 months, which buys two or three shots at product-market fit. And 85% of the portfolio is revenue-generating at seed, which she insists is design.
Founders believe their user is some 22-year-old guy sitting in Bangalore, because that is their social circle. The reality could be a 28-year-old woman in Lucknow who has three hours of uninterrupted time and is genuinely willing to pay for something that earns her attention. But are you thinking of her?
The call she got paid for
Fund II has zero real-money gaming exposure; Fund I had under 5%. Salone’s read was that the risk was asymmetric and regulation was a question of when, not if. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act took effect in October 2025, erasing an industry worth roughly $2 billion.
What survived is the interesting part. The gamer base contracted 9% to 555 million, but video games excluding RMG grew 17% to $1.5 billion and payer conversion held at one in four. The users who left were never the ones paying for entertainment.
She is watching two things now. A domestic entertainment unicorn out of microdramas, which Eloelo’s numbers make look less brave every quarter. And animation, where India’s $1.6 billion industry still earns about 80% of its revenue serving foreign studios instead of owning exportable Indian IP.
Her most recent deal is with a 19-year-old building Roblox games, who has been earning on that platform since he was 14. A fund told there was no talent in India is writing a cheque to a teenager. That is roughly where the DAU farm argument ends.
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