Padel was invented in Mexico in 1969. For its first thirty years it was a Spanish curiosity. By the time we picked up our first racket, the sport had crossed Latin America, exploded across Spain, taken root in Italy and Sweden, and started to land in cities that had never even heard of it. The numbers tell the story: in the last five years, the number of padel courts worldwide has roughly tripled, and a sport that used to feel niche outside Spain now has clubs in dozens of countries that did not have a single court a decade ago.
What is interesting about that growth is the shape of it. Padel is not arriving in cities the way tennis did, slowly and through tournaments. It is arriving the way climbing gyms arrived in the 2010s — one operator opens a club, the regulars get hooked, the second club opens within a year, by year three there are eight clubs and a Whatsapp group with five hundred people in it. The sport is socially viral in a way that tennis is not, because the doubles format is fundamentally a four-person hangout that ends in a beer.
Why we believe small cities are the right place to build
Most platforms in our category were born in Spain or Italy. They were built for the cities that had the deepest courts inventory, the most established player base, and the toughest competition. Their first customer was a club that had been on Padel This or Resakit for three years already. Their go-to-market was margin compression — undercut the incumbent on commission, win the booking layer, expand from there.
We took a different bet. The interesting cities, for a startup, are the ones where the sport is two or three years old. The clubs are still figuring out their booking flow. The players are still figuring out their friends-of-friends network. The platform that lands first and listens to both sides has a real shot at becoming the default — not because it crushed an incumbent, but because there was no incumbent to crush. The product gets to be opinionated about how booking should work and how players should find each other, instead of inheriting whatever the largest competitor decided five years ago.
Tbilisi was that kind of city. Padel arrived in 2019. By the end of 2025 there were a handful of clubs, a community Facebook group, and zero serious local platform. We saw an opportunity to build the system the city needed, in the city we lived in, with the players who would tell us when we were wrong.
The same reasoning applies to a long list of cities. Most cities outside Western Europe with a population north of a few hundred thousand are now between year zero and year five of padel adoption. Our roadmap takes us to the ones where we can build relationships with the early operators, not the ones where we would be entering as the seventeenth booking platform.
The asymmetry that makes it work
There is a quiet asymmetry to early-stage padel cities that we did not appreciate until we got into it.
Players are easy to find. You walk into any club at peak hour and there are twenty of them. They will sign up to your platform if you make booking faster, because their current alternative is messaging the front desk on Instagram.
Clubs are easy to talk to. There are five of them in the city, and the owners all know each other. We did our first three integration deals over a coffee at one of the courts. None of them had a sales-cycle gatekeeper. None of them had been pitched by a competing platform yet. The owner is also the operations manager and the only person you need to convince.
What is hard is the operational discipline. Every booking platform looks great on a slide deck. The platform that wins is the one that does not double-book on a Saturday at 18:00, that gets the cancellation refund right the first time, that does not lose a payout in a pending state for three days, that ships a Georgian-language UI before its competitor does. Those are the things that take time, and they only get built well when the team is paying attention to a small enough market to feel the bugs the next morning.
So that is the bet: build for cities small enough to feel, where the sport is young enough that the platform can shape the experience instead of inheriting one. Tbilisi is the first. There will be more.
What is next
We are in the second half of V1 ship. The product covers booking, open matches, calendar sync for clubs, monthly statements, three locales. The next two quarters are about accumulating real evidence — how many players come back, how many clubs hit the volume tier, how many open matches actually fill. Once we have that, we know which cities to step into next, and how.
If you are running a club in a city where padel is young, we would love to hear from you. The contact form lands directly in the founder team's inbox. We are deliberately small, and we are paying attention.