Updated 11/2025; original blog published 9/2023.
In October 2025, PodPlay Technologies announced its spin-off from PingPod Inc and the close of an $8 million Series A led by Frontier Growth.
PodPlay combines software, hardware, and automation to help sports clubs run more efficiently and deliver premium player experiences. Our full stack platform integrates reservations, memberships, coaching, events, and payments with proprietary technology for video replays, digital scoreboards, and autonomous access. Clubs using PodPlay have reduced labor costs by up to 66% while unlocking new digital revenue streams and social engagement.
Originally developed to power PingPod's autonomous table-tennis clubs, PodPlay has quickly expanded to meet demand in pickleball - the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. - and is now the preferred premium solution for modern, tech-driven venues. Today, PodPlay's platform powers many of the country's most innovative pickleball venues - including Pickleball Kingdom, CityPickle, Performance Pickleball, SPF, and St. Pete Athletic.
Building digital tools for businesses that transact in physical spaces is difficult. The world of atoms is less flexible than the world of bits. By definition, these businesses are subject to the limits of time and space in ways that the purely digital world is not. As a consequence, building digital tools for managing physical spaces requires deep empathy for both end customers and staff.
If you are building digital tools to manage physical spaces there is no better way to learn what to build than to manage physical spaces with technology. It is not an accident that the founders of many of the most successful Vertical SaaS companies that serve four wall businesses have a deep history or connection to the domain they serve.
One of the core reasons for PodPlay's success is building with empathy. We empathize with our customers because we started our journey as a customer. Before PodPlay, there was PingPod.
PingPod came into existence when David pitched Max and Ernesto on the idea of building a network of small format ping pong venues (Pods) in New York City neighborhoods. A Pod would be street level, highly visible, and act as its own advertisement to people walking by. The key to being able to deliver the smaller neighborhood format was to keep costs low by operating autonomously (i.e. without regular staff onsite). By substituting technology for labor, the PingPod model could simultaneously keep costs low and allow the Pods to stay open more hours than a traditional club. The model held the promise of creating economically viable supply to unlock latent demand for places to play ping pong in New York. But there was one big problem. The technology to operate autonomously didn’t exist. So we had to build it.
From day one, our vision was to build a system to operate the Pods that was highly functional but intuitive and easy to use for customers. The founding team had a deep understanding of customer needs because they were: a) customers themselves, and b) deeply embedded in the New York table tennis community. Ernesto was a former #1 player in the US and a sought after coach. Max was an avid player and core member of the infamous TT Addicts chat group dedicated to finding tables and organizing play for members of the community. David had tested his concept by doing a pop-up in Lower Manhattan to see if people would: a) pay to play ping pong on the street, and b) stop and watch ping pong being played on the street (the answers were emphatically YES and YES). Each of the founders loved to play ping pong and wanted to make the game they loved easily accessible to other players.
Version 1 of the tech stack was designed to prove that a Pod could be operated autonomously. The heavy lifting to develop v1 was done by Christine Cha, another table tennis fanatic, who laid the groundwork for how PodPlay apps look and feel today. Once the thesis was validated in a single location, we turned to building a system that could scale to hundreds of Pods over time. About this time, Ilya Rivkin, an investor in and customer of PingPod, joined us to lead our engineering team. Ilya’s experience as a customer and active member of the PingPod community, as well as his expertise building scaled mobile apps, made him the perfect fit. His previous startup, Clarity Money, was acquired by Goldman Sachs. Prior to that, he spent many years at R/GA, a digital agency, where his major projects were building the Equinox mobile app and the Nike+ running mobile app. It doesn’t get much more scaled than Equinox and Nike!
Today, PingPod is operating 20+ Pods and building out a franchise business with less than 20 full time employees. This is only possible because of the robust technology stack we have built to power the autonomous experience operating model. The model fundamentally shifts the math of the business by simultaneously reducing labor costs and allowing clubs to stay open 24/7.
On the back of the success of PingPod, and after having received many unsolicited inbound inquiries about licensing the software, we launched a second business line offering our full tech stack as a vertical SaaS solution to other recreational venues, with an initial focus on pickleball. PodPlay was born.
In Q2 2023, we launched PodPlay, a vertical SaaS offering for recreational venues, and welcomed our first clients in Ping Pong, Pickleball, Padel, and Pool. There is no requirement for sports starting with P on the platform ;)!
It was a natural progression for us to license the tech stack we built to power PingPods to other like-minded venue operators who wanted to leverage our model. In many urban areas, the demand for racquet sports venues far exceeds the supply. But legacy club and membership models are often inefficient or unprofitable uses of valuable real estate. We regularly meet with aspiring venue operators who are passionate about growing their sport, but struggle with the economics of making their vision happen.
PodPlay gives venue operators a complete set of tools to digitally manage a physical space. Core software creates efficiencies. Replay and scoreboard technology fundamentally enhances the in-venue experience. Autonomous mode shifts the economics of the business by increasing capacity and reducing costs. All are integrated into a single intuitive system that allows venue operators to do what they do best: create amazing spaces, promote healthy experiences, elevate their sport, and build vibrant communities.
The PodPlay solution offers core software functionality to manage a venue, including:
PodPlay also includes unique hardware-enabled features that fundamentally change the customer experience, open up new lines of revenue, and shift the venue business model:
The above highlights some of the major features included in the PodPlay solution today, but there is so much more to come.
If you are a venue operator, why should you trust a company that made its name creating a consumer brand to build the very best technology to run your business?
PodPlay clients may be venues, but we believe we will serve them best by designing an amazing experience for their customers. Our goal, as it has been from Day 1, is to build and refine a system that is highly functional but intuitive and delights customers. True to our roots as a consumer company, the technology we build for PodPlay clients is squarely a B2B2C offering.
We are following a time-tested strategy of building key infrastructure for an operating business, and then licensing that infrastructure to other businesses as a service. Amazon is the iconic example, with AWS and Amazon Fulfillment. While any comparison to Amazon is highly ambitious for a company of our maturity, we share an affinity for customer-centric innovation.
Using our software, PingPod has managed more than 150,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of reservations - and our PodPlay clients reap the benefits of that experience. We have stress-tested new features at PingPod before rolling them out to our PodPlay clients, and PingPods serve as “showrooms” where we can conduct “physical demos” for potential clients (we can demo on video calls with the best of them, but when it comes to the intersection of digital and physical space, there is no substitute for the IRL experience itself).
We build better software because our team uses it everyday to work and to play. All our team members regularly use our app to play the sports they love. We strongly believe that the best software is built with empathy - and the best way for us to build with empathy is to be customers ourselves.
If you’re interested in learning more, request a demo.
What’s the optimal number of members per court for a pickleball club? There isn’t a universal answer. The number changes dramatically depending on whether your members get uncapped free play, a fixed allotment, or just a discount. Before you can reason about “members per court,” you have to pick a membership model.
Nov 19, 2025