Harit Pathak and his co-founders, Jaskirat Arora and Suryansh Tibarewal, never imagined the sports banter from their WhatsApp group chat would turn into a multimillion-dollar media business someday. But that’s exactly how EssentiallySports was born.

Before it became a top-10 U.S. sports media platform (per Comscore), EssentiallySports was just a passion project run by a group of Indian college students frustrated by the little coverage their favorite sports received.

Pathak — a diehard tennis and WWE fan — spent so much time debating sports online that he eventually turned those conversations into a public blog for friends and classmates. As their community grew, the trio leaned into Reddit threads and Facebook fan pages to drive traffic.

“For the first five and a half years, it was a

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