There's a certain audacity in calling yourself "Disney from the East" when your oldest production isn't even three years old. Yet that's precisely the gambit Jason Kothari is making with Mythik, the Mumbai-and-Dubai-based entertainment venture that just closed a $5 million extension round on May 20 at a post-money valuation north of $50 million.
The extension—led by Dream11's co-founder Harsh Jain, former McKinsey chief Rajat Gupta, and Blume Founders Fund—pushes Mythik's total disclosed capital to $20 million. It arrives roughly a year after the company's $15 million seed round turned heads as one of the largest media-tech seed raises to come out of India in recent memory. For a sector not exactly known for splashy early checks, that kind of firepower suggests investors see something in Kothari's thesis that traditional studios have struggled to unlock.
The new round pulled in a mix of strategic and high-net-worth backers: Zubin Bharti Mittal from the Bharti Mittal Family Office, Point72 Ventures' Ishan Sinha, and Rooshabh Shah of SVAR Projects, among others. Existing backers Sakal Media Group and Patni Family Office also returned.
An Unusual Syndicate for an Entertainment Play
Entertainment startups don't typically assemble investor lists this eclectic. Mythik's seed round last May brought together institutional players—BITKRAFT Ventures, Visceral Capital, VC Grid—with a parade of family offices and individual investors including Shah Rukh Khan's investment arm and Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani. Former RedBird executive Marc Younan cut a check, as did Deepen Parikh of Courtside Ventures. It's the kind of syndicate that suggests either extraordinary charisma from the founder or a genuinely novel pitch. Perhaps both.
The company operates through entities registered in Mumbai and Dubai, with the Indian subsidiary incorporated on August 20, 2023 and a holding structure based in the Dubai International Financial Centre—a setup that's become standard for startups straddling regional markets.
The Technology Bet: Can AI Really Scale Mythology?
What Kothari is selling, fundamentally, is speed. Mythik is building a technology platform designed to modernize Eastern mythology, folklore, and historical narratives using AI-assisted workflows and virtual production techniques. The target audience? An estimated 3.5 billion people globally who share cultural touchpoints with these stories but have seen relatively little contemporary interpretation at scale.
The company's initial output focuses on short-form content—videos running 10 to 12 minutes—though the longer-term vision appears to extend well beyond episodic storytelling. Kothari has framed the new capital as fuel for accelerating the content slate, expanding the underlying tech platform, and building out digital experiences and consumer products. Mythik has signaled a phased rollout throughout 2026, though specifics on distribution partnerships remain under wraps.
Whether that model can actually work is the open question. AI-native production promises efficiency gains, but entertainment has always been a hit-driven business. Technology can lower the cost of iteration; it can't guarantee cultural resonance.
The Operator's Playbook
Kothari is no stranger to high-stakes turnarounds. He shepherded FreeCharge through its 2017 sale to Axis Bank (for roughly $60 million, depending on whose accounting you trust), ran Housing.com during a particularly messy restructuring, and co-led the repositioning of Valiant Entertainment ahead of its reported $100 million sale to DMG Entertainment in 2018. It's a career defined less by creating from scratch than by fixing, repositioning, and exiting.
For Mythik, he's assembled a team of approximately 200 people. That includes COO Sidharth Kedia, who previously led JioGames and ran NODWIN Gaming, and Preeti Vyas, formerly president of Amar Chitra Katha, now overseeing content strategy and consumer products. A global advisory board lends Silicon Valley credibility: former Disney corporate strategy SVP Nick van Dyk, Crunchyroll co-founder Kun Gao, ex-Amazon Studios production head John Lynch.
The roster suggests ambition well beyond the regional. But advisory boards don't greenlight shows—platforms do.
What Execution Actually Looks Like
At this stage, Mythik finds itself in the uncomfortable middle ground where capital and talent are in place but audience validation remains theoretical. The funding positions the company to compete in a market where AI-native content production is gaining real traction across India's entertainment ecosystem, yet production infrastructure and team size matter far less than what ends up on screen.
The test will be whether Mythik's technology-first approach can do something traditional studios haven't managed: translate Eastern mythology into content that travels across cultures, ages, and distribution platforms without losing its emotional core. Disney, after all, spent decades refining that alchemy. Kothari and his team are betting they can compress that timeline with better tools and a more global starting point.
Whether audiences show up for the experiment is another matter entirely.
