Here’s a sign startups have come of age in India: they’re playing in the Indian Premier League

1987 was when India first hosted the Cricket World Cup, and it became known as the Reliance World Cup, with India’s largest private sector company sponsoring it. Mass TV had just arrived and this was a cricket-mad country of more than a billion people. Big bucks started pouring into the game, which gave brands an emotional connection with the youth they were targeting.

A cola war broke out in 1996 when the Cricket World Cup came back to India. Coca Cola was the official sponsor, but it was Pepsi that got more mileage with a campaign tagged “Nothing official about it.” Ambush marketing had arrived in cricket, confirming the game’s mass appeal.

2011 was third time lucky for India, as the host nation won the Cricket World Cup. Curiously, however, many of the games of this year’s World Cup got lukewarm attendance. Were Indians finally tiring of the game? Far from it. The reason was that the World Cup was no longer cricket’s biggest showpiece; it was the Indian Premier League (IPL), which got going three years earlier.

And now, the 2015 World Cup has just concluded, with the Indians outdoing expectations by reaching the semi-finals before losing to the hosts and eventual winners Australia. But it’s as though the tournament was a mere prelude to the main event which is the IPL starting this week.

For the next month and a half, fans will queue up for hours to get into stadiums, or stay glued to TVs in sports bars or their own living rooms every evening. There will even be parks with giant screens, food, and drinks for fans who can’t make it to a stadium this year. The shorter, more action-oriented 20-20 format of the game has clearly proved more popular. Besides, all the IPL franchises are evenly matched unlike in the World Cup, where you had lopsided pairings like Australia vs Afghanistan. So hardcore cricket buffs too find this tournament more engaging.

Not surprisingly, the ad guys and brands have taken note. Apart from Reliance, the cola conglomerates, and sporting goods makers, telecom and electronics giants have taken a yen for the IPL. But this year, there are also some small, nimble startups mixing it up with the big boys.

TinyOwl, a one-year-old location-based food ordering startup, has just signed a deal with Mumbai Indians, the richest franchise in the IPL, whose owner incidentally is Reliance. “Mumbai is as much a home ground for us as it is for millions of cricket fans in the city,” says Harshvardhan Mandad, CEO and co-founder of TinyOwl.

TinyOwl raised US$16 million in series B funding just over a month ago to expand out of Mumbai – where it has over 4,000 restaurants on its platform – into 50 additional Indian cities this year. What better platform than cricket to let people know of an app to order their munchies during games?

Not just a fan, She is the owner of an IPL team and a Bollywood actress – Preity Zinta

Another mobile-focused startup Paytm, which is giving India’s ecommerce leaders a run for their money, tied up to sponsor the Mumbai Indians last year itself. Its involvement this year is likely to be much larger, with an outlay of US$4-7 million on sponsorship, ads, and freebies.