CineNow unveils leadership for its $150 million film investment fund

BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS: Building a film fund is easy. Building one that people who actually make films trust is another matter entirely, and that is the problem CineNow has just tried to solve by stacking its governance structure with names the Hindi and regional film industries already respect. The company has unveiled the leadership and governance framework for its proposed $150 million entertainment investment vehicle, bringing together veterans from film, media, entertainment and finance under three distinct bodies, an investment committee, an India council and a leadership team.

The names on the list do the heavy lifting. Sameer Nair, former chief executive of Applause Entertainment, anchors a group that includes film strategist and producer Neha Kaul, screenwriter Jaideep Sahni, producer Aashish Singh, IMPPA president Abhay Sinha, Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty and celebrity management entrepreneur Reshma Shetty, alongside senior executives drawn from entertainment, media and finance. They join CineNow chairman and managing director Rohit Dalmia and principal advisor Siddharth Roy Kapur, both familiar figures in Indian film financing and production circles.

Dalmia’s own framing of the exercise is telling. India, he said, has built an extraordinary entertainment ecosystem, but the investment architecture around entertainment is still evolving, and CineNow is trying to bring together leaders who understand content, audiences, platforms, distribution and capital to build a more institutional, portfolio-led approach. That is a polite way of saying Indian film financing has historically been improvised, relationship-driven and often opaque, and CineNow wants to professionalise it.

The division of labour across the three bodies is sensible on paper. The investment committee will oversee content evaluation, investment decisions, portfolio construction and IP value creation. The India council will bring broader industry and financial perspective, while the leadership team focuses on execution and day-to-day operations. Films will reportedly be evaluated against creative strength, commercial potential, audience opportunity, talent, production economics, distribution prospects and long-term intellectual property value, a checklist that reads more like private equity due diligence than a typical Bollywood pitch meeting.

What makes CineNow more interesting than a standard film fund is its ambition beyond the multiplex. The company is positioning itself at the intersection of entertainment and digital finance, and plans to introduce tokenisation into its investment framework, an approach it says could improve liquidity, transparency and investor access while keeping intellectual property ownership firmly with creators and production partners. The fund is also explicitly chasing value beyond box office collections, eyeing streaming rights, international distribution, music and licensing as revenue streams, reflecting a broader shift in how sophisticated investors now think about entertainment assets.

The scale of ambition is considerable. CineNow plans to back more than 30 films over the next six years, spanning Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam cinema, a genuinely pan-India slate rather than a Bollywood-only play. The company says it has already begun collaborating with filmmakers and content creators, with capital deployment expected to begin later this year. For an industry that has long complained about the scarcity of patient, institutional capital, a fund with this much star power behind its governance and this much regional breadth in its mandate is worth watching closely.