Search for ‘Pickleball’ online and you’ll likely see the friendly, playful and energetic yellow cartoon-style logo bouncing around.
That’s because Pickleheads, the Atlanta-based platform for pickleball enthusiasts with the fun yellow logo, has quickly become the go-to digital platform for connecting players in real life. Close to one million people a month use Pickleheads to find nearby courts and the platform is now the way more players are organizing their matches.
Max Ade, Picklehead’s co-founder, said the startup has “grown along with the sport.”
In 2022, a major barrier for players was just finding local courts. By 2024, the big problem was coordinating games among a large group of players.
“In the past six to twelve months, there has been another big change. Skill level has become more important than ever. And that makes a ton of sense because in 2020 and 2021 there were these massive cohorts of people that started playing for the first time. So if you looked at a breakdown of what’s the skill level of everyone who plays pickleball, it would have been like 80 percent newbies,” Ade said. Now there is a “more distributed range of skill levels,” making it more complicated to organize games that fit each player’s specific skill level.
This led to Pickleheads creating and launching its Round Robbin tool last fall. The dynamic tool lets organizers design games based on different formats and number of players.
“If you think about the evolution, it went from finding a place to play, to finding people to play with, to now it’s like finding the right game at [your] right skill level,” Ade added.
Funding Pickleheads
Back in 2022, Pickleads raised a $750,000 pre-seed round from Atlanta-based Overline VC and other investors to launch its court finder web experience. In fall 2023, the team launched a mobile version of its platform, which is now top of both the Android and iOS app stores for those searching for pickleball. The team has also secured endorsements and partnerships with USA Pickleball and the Global Pickleball Federation.
Today, the team announced it’s bringing on even more strategic investors to grow Pickleheads.
The new $2.5M seed round was led by Atlanta-based Overline VC.
Ardent, Oregon Sports Angels, Profluence Capital, Service Provider Capital, Network Ventures, and “over 65 new angel investors” also joined the round.
Ade said the Pickleheads team started the fundraising journey last summer, ultimately returning to their original pre-seed investors, Overline.
To date, Pickleheads has brought on over 100 angel investors, who Ade says are “advocates” of the brand and for pickleball as a sport.
Growing Pickleball Entrepreneurship
For Ade and many others, pickleball isn’t just a passion, it’s a business opportunity. To support the growing community of entrepreneurial players, Pickleheads recently launched a new feature, a payment processing tool, allowing organizers to host and monetize in-person events directly through the platform.
“The vision has always been to help people play more pickleball,” Ade told Hypepotamus.
That vision extends beyond just building a platform. Ade, an avid player himself, finds time to hit the court two or three times a week, though he admits he’d play more if he wasn’t balancing the demands on parenthood and entrepreneurship.
But in true founder fashion, he’s even turned his driveway into a personal pickleball court, bringing his passion closer to home.
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Photos provided by Pickleheads
