Healthy lifestyle aficionados have for a long time been using sports apps to track and monitor their fitness performance and activity levels, and now apps for partner matching such as the “Tinder for sports partners” SportsBuddy are gaining increasing popularity. RacketPal – an app co-founded by two Romanians which helps tennis, badminton, squash, and ping pong enthusiasts find the right gaming partner, differentiates from other similar platforms and apps with its algorithm that identifies the level of the players in order to make the most accurate and fair partner matches. With the goal to continue developing its product and expanding its team, the London-based startup of Bogdan Demeny and Robert Rizea recently raised €450K from the Romanian early-stage VC Neogen Capital that provides incubation support and investment to regional human resources, e-commerce, and mobility marketplaces.
Personalized tennis experience
The idea of RacketPal was born when Robert Rizea – a passionate tennis player, settled to work in London in 2016 and stumbled into the problem of not being able to find suitable gaming partners. When he got tired of using Facebook groups, he decided to create a better working solution from scratch that will both connect players and will ensure that they have the same level of skills. Three years later Rizea and the software developer Bogdan Demeny who encountered the same problem but with squash, introduced the Racketpal app, which currently enables users to search for partners, communicate with each other to organize matches with players based on location, availability, and skills level.
What does the future hold for RacketPal?
For the short time the app has been functional, it has already gained around 10 thousand users who have organized over 5 thousand matches between each other. Up until now the startup has invested €230K to develop the platform and is still not charging users for the app. In light of the recent investment, however, Rizea shares that they plan to begin monetizing the platform in order to have enough resources to further develop their algorithm and platform. The Romanian founders share that they have the bold vision to turn RacketPal into the biggest digital sports community by perfecting their product so that it resonates with the real needs of racket sports players.
