Abhimanyu Khanna named head of rights acquisition, BCCI, at JioStar

MUMBAI: Abhimanyu Khanna has stepped into a new role as head of rights acquisition, BCCI, at JioStar, putting three decades of cricket obsession to work on the business side of the sport he grew up watching.

Khanna moves up from senior director, premium sports, a role he held at JioHotstar since April 2025, where he championed the case for India as a multi-sport market spanning cricket, football, badminton and kabaddi. His new mandate is narrower but weightier: working directly with the BCCI to evaluate, acquire and manage cricket media rights, while steering commercial strategy and fan-first innovation across India’s most valuable sporting property.

Cricket may be the passion, but Khanna’s résumé is built on 14-plus years grinding through sales and channel partnerships far from the boundary rope. He spent over four years at Truecaller, rising from director of channel sales to director and lead of go-to-market and sales for global markets, before that logging stints at BlackBerry, Trend Micro, HP, Diebold and Gartner, each one sharpening a different edge of enterprise sales, distributor management and channel strategy.

That grounding in partnerships and commercial deal-making is precisely what JioStar is betting on as it looks to extract long-term value from its cricket rights portfolio, rather than treating each deal as a one-off transaction.

Thirty years of watching the game, 14 of selling everything from printers to enterprise security software, and now the biggest rights table in Indian sport awaits. Khanna’s new innings has only just begun, and the stakes could scarcely be higher.