Cricket may not be as popular a sport in the U.S. as elsewhere in the world, but some high-profile CEOs and investors are trying to change that.

As the Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup, co-hosted by the U.S. for the first time, ramps up, investors have pumped nearly a billion dollars into their American ambition.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen are among the executives investing in the new U.S. professional league, Major League Cricket. Other cricket investors include Iconic Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and executives from Google.

“What gets me excited is seeing if cricket can become a mainstream sport in the U.S.,” said Soma Somasegar, venture capitalist and managing director at Madrona.

Somasegar and Nadella are among the key owners of Seattle’s cricket team, named the Orcas. They’re also investors in the overall league.

“Satya [Nadella] and I have been talking about bringing cricket to America for many years,” Somasegar told CNBC.

Nadella is such a die-hard cricket fan that Microsoft has a cricket field at its campus in Bellevue, Washington.

“A lot of us immigrants grew up with this sport. We’d study and watch cricket — on repeat,” said Somasegar.

In total, nearly $850 million is currently in the process of being invested in building a viable cricket league in the U.S., people familiar with the funding said. The people asked not to be named because the funding information is private.

Currently, there are six professional teams in Major League Cricket, with each team expected to spend between roughly $75 million and $100 million over the coming years. That includes the cost of putting together a team, hiring the right talent and building stadiums where live cricket matches can be played.

Adding to the fanfare is the T20 World Cup, which is being held at three locations in the U.S. and several in the West Indies throughout June.

On Thursday, in a stunning blow, the U.S. team beat Pakistan in a match held near Dallas. Fans are now counting down to the highly anticipated India vs. Pakistan match Sunday at the newly developed Nassau County stadium in New York.

The last time India and Pakistan matched up, more than 300 million people in India tuned in to watch the game, according to The New York Times.

Ticket reseller StubHub said the average price of tickets for Sunday’s rivalry match is $1,300. The average price for the other 54 matches of the tournament is $120, the company said.

Venture capitalist Anurag Jain, part owner of Major League Cricket team the San Francisco Unicorns, said the U.S. national team is primarily made up of players in the league.

“The goal is to make cricket a mainstream sport,” said Satyan Gajwani, the vice chairman of Times Internet, the digital arm of the Times of India. He heads up Willow TV, which has the exclusive streaming rights for cricket in North America, including the T20 World Cup.

Gajwani is also one of the investors in the U.S. league. He said his group is going after the incredibly loyal fans from South Asia who live in the U.S.

“You essentially have five million really hard-core fans that love cricket,” Gajwani told CNBC, referring to the South Asian diaspora in the U.S.

He added that expats from the U.K. and Australia who live in the U.S. are also big consumers of cricket.

South Asians on average have the highest gross income of any ethnic group in the U.S., according to research from Indiaspora, a nonprofit community of Indian leaders around the world.

“That leaves a lot of discretionary income that is available to be spent on sports and entertainment,” said M.R. Rangaswami, founder and chairman of Indiaspora.

Rangaswami, who said he will be at the match Sunday, acknowledged that the U.S. sports scene is tough to crack, with Americans consumed by basketball and football. He said a potential entry point could be through fans of baseball, which has some resemblance to cricket.

— CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.

A major cricket world cup is coming to U.S. soil for the first time in June as the sport sets out to chart its future in the U.S.

Cricket, a game similar to baseball, originated in England and has long been popular there. But the sport has boomed in India, the world’s most populous country, as well as some other former British colonies.

In the U.S., it is mostly immigrants and their children who enjoy cricket. But in 2023, the sport got a boost as Major League Cricket debuted in the U.S. with six teams: the Los Angeles Knight Riders, MI New York, San Francisco Unicorns, Seattle Orcas, Texas Super Kings and Washington Freedom.

And now, the U.S. men’s national cricket team will represent the home country in this year’s International Cricket Council Men’s T20 World Cup. The teams play in the Twenty20, or T20, format, the shortest and most popular form of the sport. While traditional cricket matches can last as long as five days, a T20 match typically lasts around three hours.

This year’s world cup is co-hosted by the U.S. and the West Indies and will take place in three U.S. stadiums — in Texas, Florida and New York — as well as several locations in the West Indies.

“This is a historic opportunity for the U.S.,” said former ESPN cricket writer Peter Della Penna.

While it hasn’t broken through in the U.S., cricket has seen success in such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa and the West Indies. But it’s arguably made the biggest mark in India, where it’s the most popular sport in a country of more than 1.4 billion people, according to research firm Statista.

Cricket is already a big business in the Asian subcontinent. In 2022, it accounted for 85% of India’s national spending on sports, according to ISPO, which hosts trade shows for the sports business.

And viewership continues to break records. Disney said its Disney Star Network broadcast of the professional Indian Premier League, or IPL, tournament in 2023 saw a record 505 million viewers in India, making it the first one to draw more than half a billion viewers.

The average value of an IPL team has exceeded $1 billion, according to Forbes, and investors are taking notice. In June 2021, private equity firm RedBird took a 15% stake in IPL team Rajasthan Royals for $37.5 million.

A year later, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the country’s governing body for the sport, sold television and digital broadcasting rights for a record $6.2 billion. That gave the IPL the second-highest per-match value for a sporting league in the world, behind the NFL, according to Jay Shah, honorary secretary of the BCCI.

The early June world cup matchups will bring some of that star power to the U.S., with a high-profile India-Pakistan competition and culminating in a U.S.-India match.

“[The U.S.-India] match has already been sold out with 34,000 seats at the venue in New York,” Della Penna said. “That just gives you a sense of the magnitude of the opportunity that [the U.S. is] going to have during the world cup — with a television audience that’s unprecedented for any match that the U.S. has ever been involved with before — when you consider the Indian market and other markets like England or Australia.”

The ICC’s decision to host part of the world cup in the U.S. — and especially the highly anticipated India-Pakistan match — was a strategic move to take advantage of the potential for growth in the country, according to USA Cricket. The U.S. will host the tournament a few years before cricket comes to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Della Penna, who has covered cricket for nearly two decades, also said the move is financially motivated.

“[The ICC] made sure to put the India and Pakistan match on U.S. soil because they know there’s a couple million people in the [South Asian] diaspora who are massive cricket fans,” Della Penna said.

Tasmai Krishnan, a teenage cricket enthusiast in India and host of podcast “Cricstatic,” said the sport is an “integral part” of Indian culture. With new sports such as pickleball gathering popularity, Tasmai said he hopes cricket will also grow in the U.S. and he’s interested to see how the U.S. will fit into the global cricket circuit after the world cup.

“Coming from an Indian perspective, this opens another range of cricket here because it unlocks another country that is going to be a fierce competitor in the future,” Tasmai said. “This is a great learning opportunity for the U.S. team, and to see a nation like the U.S. participating, it really fills my heart with joy.”