For most Indian athletes, the hardest part of sport is not the competition—it is everything around it: proving achievements, finding equipment, accessing coaching, securing sponsorship, and answering the question every parent asks: “Kamaoge kaise?” Sagar Rai, founder of KIBI Sports, is building a company to change that. A former national-level athlete across five sports and a civil engineering graduate, Rai founded KIBI Sports in 2020 with ₹50,000 of his own pocket money. Today, the Bengaluru- and Varanasi-headquartered startup operates as a connected sports ecosystem combining verified athlete profiles, institutional SaaS, sponsorship matchmaking, CSR activation, and multi-brand sports commerce. The platform reports 90,000+ athletes verified through sports organisations, 100+ institutions, and 257+ brand partners.
An Athlete Who Saw the Gaps Firsthand
Sagar’s journey into entrepreneurship began on the field, in the pool, and in the gym. The son of paramilitary parents, he moved cities every two to three years, attending Kendriya Vidyalaya, Air Force School, and Christ Jyoti. Sport became the constant in an otherwise shifting childhood. He also grew up with chronic asthma. When local preference rules limited his opportunities in under-14 football in Assam, he turned to swimming, a sport where performance, not selection, decides opportunity. “Swimming changed my lungs,” Rai recalls. “Within months I went from district champion to state, and then to the national level.” He went on to compete nationally in swimming, football, cricket, arm wrestling, and powerlifting, while earning the Rajya Puraskar. But the experience also exposed the fragility of India’s grassroots sporting system: talented athletes often lacked verifiable records, institutional access, equipment, and a credible path to earning from sport.
Why KIBI Sports Was Born?
During his final year of B.Tech in Civil Engineering at Indus Engineering College, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Rai had prepared for the CDS examination for two years and cleared the written stage. His Plan A was the Army. But a placement orientation sparked a different question: why should Indian athletes remain invisible simply because their achievements exist only on paper? That question became KIBI Sports, incorporated on 16 September 2020. Sagar identified two structural gaps. First, India’s school, college, academy, and district tournaments largely run on paper score sheets and physical certificates, leaving athletes unable to prove their track record to sponsors, universities, or CSR teams. Second, institutions buy sports equipment through fragmented offline supply chains with inconsistent compliance and opaque pricing. KIBI Sports was designed to address both: a digital sports platform for athlete identity, tournaments, coaching, and sponsorship; and a commerce business supplying equipment from 257+ brand partners through its storefront, institutional supply channels, and international B2B exports.
The Meaning Behind “KIBI”
The name comes from Sagar’s founding belief: “Khelega India to Badhega India”, when India plays, India grows. For Sagar, the name is more than branding. It reflects his conviction that sport should be treated as a serious economic sector and career pathway, not merely an extracurricular activity. KIBI aims to build transparent digital rails and dependable equipment access for athletes and institutions from Varanasi to Bengaluru—and eventually, to global markets.
Building a Multi-Sided Sports Network
Unlike standalone tournament apps or offline equipment dealers, KIBI Sports connects the entire value chain on one operating layer. Athletes get verified digital profiles; institutions manage tournaments, rosters, attendance, fees, and procurement; brands discover and sponsor verified talent; and corporates can deploy sports CSR programmes with audit-ready documentation. The company’s growth strategy has been institution-first. Rather than spending heavily on consumer advertising, KIBI partners directly with schools, universities, academies, and tournament organisers. Institutions digitise tournaments and athlete rosters, bringing large groups of verified athletes onto the platform at once. Its commerce arm remains deliberately brand-neutral. Instead of pushing a single private label, KIBI works with authorised Indian and international brands including Yonex, Nivia, Cosco, SG, SS, Stag, Vector X, Krosfit, and US Kids Golf, offering institutions a single-invoice procurement desk.
Bootstrapped Discipline, Revenue From Day One
KIBI Sports began with ₹50,000, Sagar’s own savings and no co-founder. That constraint shaped the company’s culture. On his first night, he emailed sports brands with a simple proposition: send your catalogue, I will sell it, and give me a commission. By the next day, the store was live. Early margins from institutional and ecommerce orders funded servers, compliance, and the company’s first operations hires. The team has also been willing to kill features that do not solve real-world problems. In 2022, when blockchain was a global startup trend, KIBI tested a prototype then abandoned it after observing that district athletics organisers and physical education teachers needed fast mobile brackets and real rupee sponsorships, not crypto tokens.
From Angels to Scale
KIBI Sports has raised ₹92 lakh over $100,000 in pre-seed angel funding. Sagar says early investors initially struggled to see beyond fantasy gaming and cricket fan apps when they heard “sports tech.” What changed the conversation was operating traction: revenue of ₹3.07 crore in FY26, alongside its growing network of athletes, institutions, and brand partners. The capital is being deployed into the multi-tenant institutional SaaS platform, the three-stage brand and CSR matchmaking engine, domestic and GeM supply-chain expansion, and international B2B export corridors across the UK, UAE, USA, and Australia. KIBI also has ecosystem backing from NVIDIA Inception, Google for Startups, and the Intercom Fin AI Startup Program.
AI With Guardrails
Sagar still writes production code and treats operational bottlenecks as software architecture problems rather than headcount problems. KIBI’s lean 18-member team uses AI across three core areas:
- Brand and CSR matchmaking: Combining deterministic filters, vector embeddings, and LLM evaluation to match sponsors with athletes and campus tournaments in under 60 seconds.
- Institutional procurement intelligence: Using document AI to map school, university, and GeM equipment bills of materials across brand partners.
- Compliance and verification: Running automated workflows behind quality, privacy, and compliance tests to preserve trust.
The company’s platform includes athlete profiles, events and live scoring, secure fundraising, sponsorship tools, CSR and ESG activations, and a sports marketplace positioning KIBI as infrastructure rather than a single-purpose app.
Making Grassroots Sponsorship Sustainable
Sagar argues that traditional sports sponsorship in India is dangerously top-heavy, with the majority of budgets concentrated on a small group of celebrity cricketers. KIBI’s answer is a five-tier athlete sponsorship architecture, from Nano to Mega, based on verified credentials and regional community reach. This allows challenger brands to sponsor cohorts of 20 verified state and national medallists at a fraction of the cost of one celebrity endorsement, while often achieving stronger regional engagement. KIBI also helps corporates deploy Companies Act Section 135 Schedule VII sports CSR funds into rural and government school programmes, para-athletes, and district academies with audit-ready documentation. For individual athletes, the platform offers zero-platform-fee crowdfunding, allowing verified athletes to raise money for international travel, para-sport equipment, or high-performance coaching while keeping 100% of supporter contributions.
The Road Ahead
Sagar’s ambition is explicitly global. Over the next 18 to 24 months, KIBI aims to scale from 90,000+ to 500,000+ verified athletes, grow from 100+ to 1,000+ partner institutions, and expand corporate sports CSR programmes across 500+ government and rural schools. Internationally, the company plans to deepen its sports equipment export corridor across the UK, Europe, GCC/UAE, North America, and Australia through its DGFT-registered export business and US subsidiary, KIBI SPORTS Inc. in Delaware. With India preparing for the 2030 Commonwealth Games centenary cycle and pursuing a bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics, Sagar believes the country needs more than medals it needs digital and supply-chain infrastructure for every athlete below the celebrity tier.
His mission remains simple: no talented Indian athlete should have to quit sport because they lacked a verifiable digital identity, genuine equipment, or a credible answer to “Kamaoge kaise?”
Interview By: Sejal Thakur
