Some startups start with a pitch deck. PodPlay Technologies started with a ping pong table in a Manhattan basement. Born from PingPod Inc.’s vision of autonomous table tennis, it’s now rewriting the business of play itself, today announcing an $8M Series A led by Frontier Growth, with Partner Dave Pandullo joining the board. Not just capital, but validation that tech and recreation can finally share the same court.
PodPlay began as PingPod’s in-house ops engine, powering 24/7 venues that ran themselves, no staff, no downtime, just precision. But when the system proved it could scale, Co-Founder & CEO Maximilian H. Kogler and his crew saw the bigger picture. What if that same vertical SaaS platform, built to manage booking, scoring, payments, and replays, could power every participatory sport on the planet? In 2023, PodPlay spun out with code, cameras, and conviction.
The founding lineup reads like a masterclass in range. Maximilian H. Kogler went from Goldman Sachs to Stanford to running a $400M hedge fund before bringing that discipline to sports tech. Co-Founder & CTO Ilya Rivkin coded Nike+ Running and Goldman’s mobile stack before architecting PodPlay’s platform. Co-Founder & CFO David Silberman took his UBS finance playbook and turned it into startup precision. Co-Founder Ben Borton, who leads GTM, was PingPod’s 1st outside investor and a finance veteran with Figure Technologies and Mountaineer Partners. And Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer Ernesto Ebuen, once the #1-ranked U.S. table tennis player, brings the athlete’s DNA to the tech that now fuels the game.
Frontier Growth saw the signal. PodPlay tripled revenue YoY, now powers 200+ venues across 11 sports, and serves nearly 1M users. Their exclusive deal with Pickleball Kingdom covers nearly 400 franchises. That’s not just market entry, that’s market domination.
PodPlay’s full-stack platform fuses software, hardware & automation into a single rhythm: real-time video replays, Bluetooth scoring, autonomous entry, and 24/7 remote monitoring handled by a dedicated team in the Philippines. Venues using PodPlay have cut labor costs by up to 93%, proving that technology isn’t replacing people, it’s freeing them to play more.
With fresh funding, the company’s moving beyond pickleball into padel, golf sims & multisport arenas, turning local rec centers into smart, data-driven destinations. This isn’t another SaaS tool; it’s the infrastructure for a new era of active entertainment. In a world obsessed with screens, PodPlay is betting on sweat, stats & software.
