Gaming
Nitish Mittersain steps down as Nazara CEO, Raymond Stauffer takes over
The founder steps back as chief executive after doubling revenue and market cap, staying on as managing director to plot the next level
MUMBAI: Nitish Mittersain has done the thing founders rarely manage gracefully: he built the business, stepped away, came back to fix it, and is now stepping aside again on his own terms. After a second stint as chief executive of Nazara Technologies, India’s first and only listed gaming company, Mittersain is handing the CEO title to Raymond A. Stauffer while staying on as managing director. This is not an exit, it is a handover engineered from a position of strength.
The numbers explain why he can afford to look this relaxed about it. Between FY23 and FY26, under his second stint as CEO, Nazara’s revenue climbed from Rs 1,091 crore to Rs 1,829 crore, while EBITDA more than doubled from roughly Rs 110 crore to Rs 255 crore. Market capitalisation went from around Rs 3,800 crore to over Rs 12,500 crore, with the share price up roughly 120 per cent on an adjusted basis. Along the way, Mittersain raised over Rs 1,600 crore in growth capital, pulling in backers including Nikhil and Nithin Kamath, Mithun Sacheti and SBI Mutual Fund, and closed the $303 million acquisition of Bluetile and BestPlay, the largest deal in Nazara’s history. For a company that started as a one-person idea, that is a genuinely formidable scoreboard.
What makes the exit interesting is the candour around it. Mittersain openly admits not every call landed as planned, some investments took longer to mature, a few integrations proved trickier than expected, and industry turbulence tested the strategy along the way. That kind of honesty from a founder handing over the keys is rare, and it lends real weight to his claim that the company today is more global, more gaming-focused and structurally stronger across mobile, PC and console gaming, AI, data and user acquisition than when he walked back in.
Stauffer inherits a platform reaching over 100 million monthly users across mobile games, esports, gamified learning and adtech, spanning properties like Nodwin Gaming, Nextwave Multimedia, Sportskeeda and Halaplay. Mittersain, for his part, is not disappearing, as managing director he keeps a hand on strategic partnerships, stakeholder relationships and long-term direction, the classic founder move of stepping back from operations while staying close to the steering wheel. Given the track record, betting against Nazara’s next chapter would be unwise.
