Padel match booking firm raises £4.5m in major fund raise
Major padel match booking app Playtomic has raised €5.1m from an investment raise which will see thousands of players become shareholders.
The big-money fund raise closed this month with more than 4,600 investors buying into the social padel service to the tune of £4.5m.
The fund was organised through private equity market investment platform Crowdcube, which has active opportunities across a range of sectors from cancer care to financing.
Their recent results show £25m net revenue with transactions of over £300m, with the raise said to allow the firm to “reinforce its technology, expand its operational capacity, accelerate its international growth, and continue developing new sports such as pickleball”.
Playtomic claims to serve 4.7m players across 6,000 partner clubs in 66 countries. Their recent
“This result confirms what we have always known: our community is Playtomic’s engine,” said Felix Ruiz, co-founder and chief executive of the padel match booking app.
“The fact that more than 4,600 people chose to invest in us shows immense confidence and motivates us to continue building the world’s largest racket sports community together.
“They are not just users: they are now co-owners.”
Padel round up
The popularity of padel has surged in recent years, with Britain alone now having over 1,000 clubs.
And British entrepreneur Jonathan Rowland plans to build the “world’s biggest padel venue” in Abu Dhabi.
“We’re positioning ourselves now as a sports and media business with really niche sports at the core of what we do,” Rowland told Morning Wire in November.
“That obviously incorporates padel, and that’s probably our most visible business, but we are about to do something very big in pickleball and we’ve created a production company around racket sports. But the main rationale is to bring R3 and VVV together to create a more powerful, financially stable and opportunistic vehicle.
“Bringing these two companies together gives us more access to capital, more visibility, and brings new ideas and new people into the business to create something that doesn’t really exist, which is a pure play on this sort of investment. Everywhere you look now there is investment into sport and it’s becoming a real asset class which is unstoppable at the moment.”