Mahesh Bhupathi-backed Hudle swings for growth with fast-rising sport pickleball

Pickleball is seeing maximum growth in infrastructure in India currently

Sports community platform Hudle expects the fastest growing sports pickleball to drive the biggest growth in infrastructure as well as add more people in the player pool.

The platform which currently has close to 2,000 venues sees potential to add more venues with a universe of around 15,000 to 20,000 overall venues.

"The infrastructure is increasing at a very rapid pace. For instance, 300 pickleball courts were added last month on the platform and these are new pickleball courts that were built," Arjun Singh Verma, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO), told Moneycontrol.

Pickleball picking up

Pickleball is seeing maximum growth in infrastructure in India currently, he added.

"It's easy to build pickleball courts as it requires low capital. Hence, the ticket charge for a player is lesser. When you make a football turf or a box cricket turf, the cost is close to Rs 30 lakh and players can be charged Rs 2,000 for an hour. Whereas a pickleball court can be built for up to Rs 5 lakh and players can be charged Rs 1,000 per hour," he added.

Verma also pointed out that in most racket sports like badminton there are 90 percent male players playing the game and only 10 percent female players.

"In pickleball, the divide is more like 60-40 which shows that a lot of participation is also increasing from multiple players. It's becoming a cultural kind of a trend where families are also playing together which we never saw in other sports."

There are five core sports that are growing significantly in terms of bookings.

"Number one sport is pickleball and it just crossed badminton two months back. We are doing close to 50,000 (bookings) for pickleball on the platform in a month. In total, we are doing around 1.6 lakh games in a month," he added.

Until the introduction of pickleball and paddle, it was mostly serious players booking on the platform, Verma noted. "With the introduction of easier sports, now we are seeing the universe expand where people of all age groups, genders are trying to pick up sports."

Growing beyond metros

When it comes to pickleball, a lot of the growth is driven by smaller cities.

"We have seen a lot of growth in places like Surat, Vadodara, Jaipur, Indore, Bhopal. We are seeing a lot of participation from people from these cities. But the infrastructure is not as much as we see in Tier I cities."

While Hudle is present in 80 cities, Verma said that strong structure in terms of sports venues is only in 10 cities.

"We want to get into the other 70-odd cities and help the small entrepreneurs that are building these sports venues and go deeper into the market in all of these cities."

He is targeting everything from private land, school sports grounds to hotels with sports venues within their premises.

"We are trying to convince people to use the dead spaces for sports," he said.

Hudle is also working with top hotels like Taj Lands End in Mumbai. "They have built a pickleball and a paddle court on one of their floors. It is only open for premium members as they priced it like that but it is open to the public as well. Also, one of the Ginger hotels have built one pickleball court. We are in talks with a lot of hotel chains where they want to build some or the other sports infrastructure. Usually hotels had gyms and pools, but now a lot of guests want a pickleball or a paddle court. There is a lot of interest from hotels," Verma added.

Out of the total sports venue listings, currently schools account for a big part as they have sports infrastructure which they open to public after school hours.

"It is a good mix between schools and private lands right now in terms of sports venues listed on the platform. As we are scaling, a lot of commercial complexes are also interested and a lot of hotels as well," he added.

Scaling up

To scale up, the company recently raised $2.5 million in a Series A round led by Sky Impact Capital, with participation from Physis Capital, Atrium Venture, 12-time tennis Grand Slam winner Mahesh Bhupathi, TV presenter and producer Gaurav Kapur and one of the founders of Blue Tokai — Shivam Shahi, and Nitro Commerce's Umair Mohammed.

"In August, we are revamping the entire app. So far, we were a transactional platform, helping people book courts. Now, we are trying to become a player-first platform where a player can track their entire journey of how they are performing. There is a rating system that we are introducing called GRIP, which is a game rating index for players. It is a completely new feature that we are adding only for racket sports where people can add their scores and they will get a rating and then they can match with similar skill level players."

He also plans to add highlights using Artificial Intelligence (AI). "We will be putting cameras in certain courts and call them smart courts. A person playing in that court can get highlights of their game, their heat map, how much did they run, etc. So a lot of player-focused features we are working on, and for that we are building a stronger technology team."

In total, the company has raised Rs 20 crore over the past three funding rounds.