Salone Sehgal Built India’s First Interactive Media Fund When the Category Had No Name
When Salone Sehgal launched Lumikai Fund in 2020, interactive media was not a recognised asset class, gaming was routinely confused with real-money gaming, and India was still being written off by capital markets as a low-ARPU consumer market that would never monetise. Six years on, Lumikai manages over $100 million across two funds, has produced category leaders across micro-drama, social entertainment, AI tutoring and enterprise virtual reality, and operates inside a sector that the wider venture market has belatedly recognised, with India now home to 591 million gamers, roughly 18% of the world’s gaming population, and a gaming market valued at around $5.9 billion in 2025 that is forecast to reach close to $16.7 billion by 2034.
A two-decade route through finance and operating built an investor’s instinct for behaviour, not content
Sehgal, Founder and Managing Partner at Lumikai, came to fund management through an unusually layered route, having started in finance and private equity M&A in Europe before founding and running a gaming company out of the UK and then investing globally through a London-based venture fund. That combination gave her both quantitative and qualitative toolkits, and it shaped a conviction that the most valuable stage of investing sat between seed and growth. “I love bringing that entrepreneurial lens to investing,” she said, explaining that the experience set she carried made early-stage company building the place where an investor could genuinely shape an outcome rather than merely back one.
The thesis behind Lumikai was that interactive media is not fundamentally about content, platforms or the technology that enables them, but about businesses that shape behaviour. Sehgal pointed out that several of the most successful social platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram, are game mechanics in disguise, engineering the same dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphin responses that make games habit-forming, and that the same systems of play can be embedded across edtech, health, fintech and commerce to unlock retention and monetisation among a mobile-first generation she described internally as the swipe before type cohort.
Building the market came before investing in it, in a country dismissed for low average revenue per user
Launching a fund in a category nobody had a vocabulary for meant educating founders before deploying capital. Sehgal recalled that India was seen as a low-ARPU market, where average revenue per user lagged Western benchmarks, that gaming was confused with real-money gaming, and that capital preferred the familiarity of SaaS, fintech and commerce, which left Lumikai to define what it would not fund and import strategic limited partners from Europe, Asia and the US. “In emerging categories, capital alone is not enough,” she said, adding that conviction had to be built through research and founder education.
That positioning has produced a portfolio that now reads as validation. Lumikai closed Fund II in 2024 and is currently deploying from it, with category leaders including Elo Elo in social entertainment, Story TV as India’s leading micro-drama platform and the world’s second most downloaded entertainment app, Supernova as an AI tutor and companion for language learning and test preparation, and Autoverse as India’s fastest-growing virtual reality company. Around half the portfolio is building for global markets.
On AI, Sehgal argued that the technology will lower the barrier to building without levelling the field of who wins. “AI will democratise creation, but what it will not democratise is judgment,” she said, noting that Lumikai evaluates AI businesses across creation, interaction, distribution and economics, and that companies competing at only one layer tend to become redundant quickly. As one of a single-digit percentage of women to have launched a fund, she said the change rests on a simple principle, that you cannot be what you cannot see.
