How CREX is building a business around cricket’s always

How CREX is building a business around cricket’s always-on fandom

The match may be on the television, but CREX wants to capture everything fans do between the overs.

Ubaid Zargar23 Sep 2026
05:30IST
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The modern cricket fan rarely watches a match alone. The television may still command the room, but the phone has become an equally important companion, serving up stats, arguments, memes, polls and enough hot takes to last until the next over.

For CREX, that second-screen habit is not merely a trend. It is the business.

The cricket platform, which today claims more than 125 million downloads and around 30 million monthly active users, was not built with such lofty ambitions in mind. It began in 2017 as a hostel-room project by founder Purushotam Rawat, who was then a student at NIT Patna.

“It started way back in 2017 with Purushotam, the founder,” recalls Shakir Jamil, head of marketing at CREX. “It began as a hostel room project while he was still in college.”

The app arrived on the Google Play Store around the 2018 IPL season and was initially run by a small team of developers and operations staff responsible for live scoring and match updates. 

When Jamil joined as growth and strategy manager in 2022, the challenge was clear: the cricket information market was already crowded with established players.

“We were very clear from the fact that there is already Cricbuzz and Cricinfo in the market,” he says. “So how can we differentiate? What is the opportunity for the coming five to ten years?”

From score updates to fandom

The answer lay in understanding that fans increasingly wanted participation, not just information

Fantasy sports had already demonstrated that cricket followers wanted to be more involved with the sport. Not everyone wanted to spend money on fantasy contests, but many wanted to engage more deeply than simply reading a scorecard.

“We understood that people want to do more with the sport,” says Jamil. “Not just follow it in terms of getting information. They want to be involved in the game.”

That insight prompted the company to expand beyond scores and statistics. Polls, quizzes, discussions, social features and creator-led content became increasingly important parts of the platform.

“We started building more and more community features. We built polls, quizzes, discussions and social. An entire suite of features which helps users participate and interact with the community.”

The platform now features discussions, creator content, quizzes and opinion-led interactions designed to keep users engaged long after a score update has been delivered. CREX works with creators and cricket personalities, including Akash Chopra and other cricket influencers, to deepen those interactions.

The company says users spend roughly 25 minutes a day on the platform, a figure Jamil believes reflects the depth of engagement rather than simple scale.

“This is not people just coming on the application for getting a score update and going away,” he says. “Our average CREX user spends 22-24 minutes on the application daily.”

According to him, competing platforms typically see users spend around 10-12 minutes per day.

“With scale, we have managed to keep a very healthy engagement time as well.”

That engagement is visible during major tournaments. CREX says it crossed 100 million downloads on Google Play this year and has more than 125 million downloads across platforms.

Monthly active users generally range between 25 million and 35 million depending on the cricket calendar. During this year’s IPL final, the platform recorded more than 10 million daily active users. Jamil credits part of that growth to the company’s app-first origins.

“We were an app-first company,” he says. “We were not a product made on the web and then trying to cater to an application audience. The whole experience of using the application was different.”

Selling the second screen

For advertisers, the rise of second-screen behaviour has created a different challenge.The audience may still be watching the match, but much of its attention now lives elsewhere.CREX estimates that more than 50 million fans interacted with its platform during IPL 2026 alone.

The company’s pitch to marketers is built around a simple idea. If fans are already checking scores, debating decisions and following conversations while watching a game, brands should participate in those moments rather than simply buying visibility around a broadcast.

Historically, a significant portion of the company’s revenue came from programmatic advertising and real-money gaming brands. But Jamil says CREX began rethinking its advertising strategy well before regulatory changes hit the gaming sector.

“We understood that we need to give them some innovative approaches to target this audience,” he says.

One example is its integration with FanCode. Users can purchase streaming passes and watch matches without leaving the app.

“The whole experience becomes very native,” says Jamil.

The company has also experimented with branded quizzes, splash-screen takeovers and custom engagement experiences. A partnership with Delhi Capitals attracted more than 700,000 users through a franchise-themed quiz experience that offered merchandise and rewards.

“We are not very constrained by the fact that these are the only solutions we are providing,” he says. “It depends on what problem the brand is looking to solve.”

Another example involved a splash-screen integration for an event partner, where branding appeared on the first screen users encountered when opening the app.

“Users are not getting frustrated by it either. And the information that the brand wants to pass is given to the users.”

Advertising remains the company’s dominant revenue stream. Subscription revenue currently contributes only around 2-3% of overall revenue, though Jamil sees significant potential in that area.

“We don’t want to push it too early,” he says. “We want to build enough value for the users to subscribe.”

The strategy, he explains, is to first create compelling premium experiences and then gradually introduce monetisation.

“It cannot just be the only value that we want to give to our users. We want to build more value.”

Cricket’s next innings

While business fundamentals matter, cricket itself remains the platform’s heartbeat.

The IPL continues to be what Jamil calls “the holy grail of engagement”, followed closely by ICC tournaments. Yet one of the strongest trends CREX has observed in recent years is the growth of women’s cricket.

“We have seen year on year women’s cricket grow,” he says. “But right now it competes with a very good India bilateral match.”

He points to growing awareness around players such as Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Shafali Verma as evidence that audiences are increasingly investing in the women’s game.

“People are actually watching. They know about the sport, the women’s sport as well. They are interested in talking about it and following it.”

That growth has informed the company’s own marketing efforts. CREX has partnered with Harmanpreet Kaur for three consecutive years, creating campaigns and activations around major women’s cricket tournaments.As a bootstrapped company, however, CREX remains selective about where it spends its marketing budget.

Behind the scenes, CREX relies on a combination of human expertise and artificial intelligence. Ball-by-ball scoring and commentary are still largely handled by in-house teams. AI is then used to generate visualisations and advanced statistical layers.

The sport is increasingly grappling with concerns around scheduling, bilateral relevance and audience fatigue. Jamil acknowledges that bilateral matches do not generate the same level of excitement as marquee tournaments, but he remains optimistic about the long-term outlook.

“I don’t feel that the fandom is going to take a hit,” he says. “Maybe the way of following will change. The way of consuming the sport will change.”

In fact, he believes cricket may increasingly resemble football, where franchise loyalties become just as powerful as national allegiances.

The company says it has recorded annual user growth of roughly 20-30% over the past few years. Going forward, Jamil expects growth to come from stronger brand partnerships, deeper community engagement and a more developed subscription ecosystem.

Smriti MandhanaDigitalCricbuzzIPLSocial mediaCricketICCHarmanpreet Kaurmobile appCREXsports marketingfandomwomen’s cricket
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