Jason Kothari's Mythik Raises $5M at $50M+ Valuation to Bring Eastern Mythology to Global Audiences With AI
Mythik, the AI‑powered mediatech company founded by former Freecharge and Housing.com CEO Jason Kothari, has raised an additional $5 million in fresh capital, taking its post‑money valuation past $50 million and its total disclosed funding to $20 million across two rounds.
The latest infusion is an extension of the $15 million seed round Mythik announced in May 2025, described at the time as the largest seed investment in India's media‑tech segment. The new investors joining this extension include Harsh Jain, founder and CEO of Dream11, India's largest fantasy sports platform; Rajat Gupta, co‑founder of the Indian School of Business; Zubin Bharti Mittal; Ishan Sinha; Blume Ventures through its Blume Founders Fund; and Rooshabh Shah. Existing backers reinforcing their positions include Sakal Media Group, the family office of Anirudh Patni, Samarth Parekh, and former Enam Asset Management Group CEO Samir Vora.
The round reflects what a number of India‑focused investors are beginning to call the storytelling economy: a structural bet that culturally rooted intellectual property, particularly from civilizations with deep mythological traditions, represents an undervalued global content asset at the exact moment AI is lowering the production cost of building and distributing that content at scale.
What Mythik Is Building
Founded in April 2025, Mythik is a technology‑first entertainment company. Its core thesis is that Eastern mythology, comprising Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian traditions, represents a 3.5 billion‑person built‑in audience that global entertainment has largely ignored or misrepresented.
The company uses artificial intelligence alongside virtual production technologies to develop IP rooted in Eastern mythology and folklore, creating original content designed for global distribution rather than domestic consumption alone. The approach deliberately targets the model that worked for Marvel and the DC extended universe but applies it to source material that has never received that level of industrialized franchise treatment.
Kothari has described the company's positioning in straightforward competitive terms: global entertainment has been dominated by Western studios and Western storytelling frameworks for decades. The commercial success of regionally rooted content in recent years, including Korean drama exports, the global reach of Indian streaming content, and the international performance of Japanese anime, provides evidence that audiences worldwide respond to culturally specific storytelling when it is delivered through high‑quality production.
Mythik's founding team was assembled to execute at that production quality. Senior executives from Disney, Netflix, Amazon Studios, Jio, and Tencent are all represented within the founding and executive team, providing the institutional production and distribution knowledge required to take mythology‑based IP through the content development pipeline. The company currently employs approximately 200 people across content, technology, product, and design functions.
The Revenue Story Behind the Valuation
The $50 million valuation is not purely speculative. Mythik published financial disclosures showing the underlying business has been growing at a pace that makes the valuation step‑up understandable.
Revenue for FY 2024‑25 reached Rs 16.8 crore ($1.98 million), a 786 percent year‑on‑year increase from Rs 1.9 crore in FY 2023‑24. Net profit for the same period came in at Rs 1.6 crore, compared to Rs 17.4 lakh the prior year, a jump of more than 840 percent. EBITDA rose from Rs 28 lakh to Rs 2.7 crore. The company's total assets stood at Rs 17.3 crore as of March 31, 2025.
Those numbers reflect a company that moved from near‑zero commercial activity to a profitable operating position within its first year of operations, which is uncommon even by the standards of a well‑funded media startup. The employee count of approximately 200 represents a meaningful operational build for a company that did not exist 14 months ago.
The Founder Behind the Company
Jason Kothari's career has a recurring theme: taking undervalued assets in adjacent industries and repositioning them against global markets.
His earliest notable example is Valiant Entertainment, the comic book publisher that had gone through bankruptcy. Kothari led its acquisition and managed a turnaround that culminated in a $100 million sale to DMG Entertainment in 2018. Along the way, Valiant developed a comics‑to‑film pipeline that attracted comparisons to Marvel's early franchise‑building phase. The intellectual property extraction model he used at Valiant is directly applicable to what Mythik is attempting with Eastern mythology.
After Valiant, Kothari joined Housing.com as CEO during one of the most turbulent periods in Indian consumer tech, stabilizing the company following the departure of founding CEO Rahul Yadav. He subsequently led Freecharge's integration into Snapdeal and later its sale to Axis Bank. His board positions have included Balaji Telefilms and Emaar India, and he served as a senior advisor to SoftBank during the Masayoshi Son and Nikesh Arora era.
That profile, operating turnarounds, media IP strategy, consumer technology leadership, and deep relationships across Indian institutional finance, is reflected in the investor roster Mythik has assembled across two rounds. Shah Rukh Khan's family office participated in the original $15 million seed. Sakal Media Group, one of India's largest media companies, is a strategic backer with distribution relevance. The addition of Dream11's Harsh Jain connects Mythik to the largest sports technology platform in India and the consumer engagement infrastructure it has built.
Market Context and What the Capital Is For
India's media and entertainment market is projected to grow from $30 billion in 2024 to $48 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9.8 percent. The global AI video market is expected to reach $42 billion by 2033, growing at 32 percent annually. India's animation and VFX segment alone is projected to touch $2.2 billion by 2026.
Mythik's positioning sits at the intersection of those three growth curves: a market expanding through rising streaming consumption, a production technology becoming dramatically cheaper through AI, and a geographic origin that has generated the world's densest mythology traditions across cultures including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, and dozens of regional folk traditions.
Kothari has indicated that the $5 million will be deployed toward expanding the content slate, upgrading the technology platform, and rolling out new digital experiences and consumer products. A phased rollout of Mythik's public‑facing platform is expected to begin at some point during 2026, though the company has not disclosed specific titles, release windows, or platform partnerships yet.
For investors watching whether Indian mediatech can produce a globally scaled entertainment company, not just a domestic streaming platform, Mythik is one of the most specific bets currently in the market.
