MAM
Dream Sports CTO Amit Sharma exits to co found stealth AI startup
Tech leader leaves after nearly 10 years, having scaled Dream11’s engineering team to 600
MUMBAI: Every winning streak eventually reaches the final whistle. For Amit Sharma, that finish line has become the starting block for his next AI-powered venture. Sharma, Chief Technology Officer at Dream Sports and Co-founder of Dream Play, has stepped down after nearly a decade with the sports technology company and joined a stealth-mode artificial intelligence startup as co-founder.
The announcement came through a LinkedIn post in which Sharma reflected on his journey from Silicon Valley to Mumbai and the role he played in scaling one of India’s biggest consumer internet businesses.
Sharma joined Dream11 in December 2016 after returning to India following 12 years in the United States, where he worked in engineering roles at Yahoo and Netflix. He said the decision to relocate was questioned by many at the time, but ultimately proved to be a defining career move.
When he arrived, Dream11 was a 45-member company with a technology team of around 20 engineers. Over the next nine years and eight months, he helped grow that engineering organisation to nearly 600 members, all based in Mumbai, while Dream Sports expanded into a sports technology company serving 250 million users across brands including Dream11, FanCode and DreamSetGo.
“Together, we built some of the most technically complex systems and most-loved apps in the country,” Sharma wrote, while thanking Dream Sports co-founders Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth for their trust and support throughout his journey.
Alongside his CTO responsibilities, Sharma also served as Head of Business Strategy at DreamX between August 2022 and August 2024 before co-founding Dream Play in January 2025. At Dream Play, he led the development of AI-powered sports intelligence systems designed to make performance analysis and athlete training more data-driven and accessible.
His next move continues that AI focus. Sharma has now joined a new startup operating in stealth mode as co-founder. While he has not revealed further details, he indicated that artificial intelligence will be central to the venture, saying he is looking forward to “building something new in AI”.
The transition reflects a broader trend of senior technology leaders leaving established internet companies to launch AI-first ventures, as artificial intelligence reshapes both consumer technology and enterprise software.
