PodPlay provides a full-stack operating system for modern recreational sports venues, integrating app-based reservations, automated video replays, digital scoreboards, smart facility access, and payments to enable autonomous operations, reduce labor costs, and enhance the player experience. Pulse 2.0 interviewed PodPlay co-founder and CRO Ben Borton to learn more.
Ben Borton’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Borton said:
“I build at the intersection of sports, technology, and experience. As Co-Founder of PodPlay Technologies, I lead go-to-market strategy and channel the ambition to make every club, court, and physical space more than just a site for a transaction. We’re crafting a platform that turns play into participation, content, community, and growth. Our mission is to increase the amount of fun being had in the world.”
“Before PodPlay, I served as Head of Digital Fund Services at Figure Technologies (FIGR) where I led the business unit responsible for issuing blockchain native private fund interests. This role sharpened my ability to drive adoption of emerging tech. Previously I was a Partner at hedge funds Mountaineer Partners and MM Capital and have been an active technology angel investor.”
“My years in fintech and strategy taught me to align the product with the go-to-market game plan. In PodPlay’s case, our product naturally generates shareable content – every match produces a stream of short video replays – so we saw an opportunity to leverage that. We could have hired a big SaaS sales team and gone the traditional route, but instead we leaned into a strategy that plays to our strengths. Basically, we let the content created by our product do a lot of the talking for us.”
“In practice, PodPlay’s growth motion couples content-based lead generation with founder-led sales. The beauty of digital content is that it’s highly scalable: those highlight replays essentially become free marketing, sparking interest and building a relationship with players and club owners before we even speak to them. Our philosophy is that if we have the best product and the best content, growth will follow naturally. That creates a super-efficient flywheel – we get to reinvest more into R&D, which extends our product lead, which in turn generates even more great content and user excitement.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Borton shared:
“PodPlay grew directly out of the tech platform we built to power PingPod – the autonomous table tennis concept. From day one, we knew the technology we were building could go far beyond just ping pong. By summer 2023, our system was battle-tested and our team was strong enough that we felt confident creating PodPlay as its own company to serve a wider range of participatory sports venues. The timing was perfect because the pickleball community was exploding and looking for modern solutions.”
“People saw what we’d done in ping pong – a mobile-first booking system fully integrated with hardware features like digital scoreboards, instant replays, and even autonomous mode – and they wanted that same magic for pickleball. Seeing that demand really pushed us to go all-in with PodPlay. We realized we weren’t just solving a PingPod problem; we had the foundation for something much bigger that could elevate the experience at any sports club.”
“In August 2025, we formally spun off PodPlay from PingPod as a standalone company ahead of raising an $8 million Series A round led by Frontier Growth to fuel PodPlay’s growth.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Borton reflected:
“I have two sons, ages 13 and 11. My favorite moments have been seeing them enjoy the product and even proudly tell their friends about it. They went to camp at PingPod. They helped me test out a new version of the PodPlay instant replay feature. They like to wear PingPod and PodPlay swag. My older son even requested shirts and sweatshirts to give to his friends!”
“Building a product that appeals to your kids is gratifying, but it is also good business. I wrote a blog called Build Something You Are Proud Of describing how that principle drives word-of-mouth, and can also be a good guide for product design.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Borton explained:
“There are 3 layers of the product offering:
1.) Software – At its core, PodPlay is a mobile-first booking engine built for venue operators. Each client gets a white-labeled web and app experience under their own brand. Our goal is to create the best user experience in the market by a wide margin. As the digital front door to your club, a modern, branded, intuitive reservation management app is essential to creating an elevated customer experience. We wrote more about this in Your App is Your Front Door.
2.) Hardware – Digital scoreboards and instant replay systems that turn every match into a shareable highlight. When players hit a winning shot, they press a button, and within seconds, their clip appears on the monitor and in their app. Players want to share the experience, but they don’t want friction. We wrote more about creating a magical video experience in Why User-Generated Replays Matter.
Clubs can also monetize those replays. Sponsors buy ad slots embedded in the clips, creating new revenue streams that, in some cases, exceed what clubs pay PodPlay each month. We like to say these are Billboards, But Better. If someone’s sharing a video of themselves having fun in your club, what’s better marketing than that?
3.) Autonomy – The top tier of the PodPlay offering combines software and hardware with full access control and 24/7 remote monitoring, allowing venues to operate without on-site staff. We have seen customers reduce labor costs by as much as 66% by operating autonomously, with others redirecting those resources to high value add initiatives like coaching and community building. Roughly a quarter of PodPlay’s partners run fully autonomous clubs; the rest use the platform for software or hybrid operations. We have established ourselves as the category leader for autonomous experiences.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Borton acknowledged:
“The biggest challenges for PodPlay have been related to rapid growth. Maintaining an extraordinary level of customer service while tripling the size of the business in a year. An enormous volume of feature requests. Demand to bring the technology to new geographies. There is a point for a business where you go from saying yes to everything to having to say no to opportunities that may sound great in theory but would distract from the core mission of delivering the very best product experience to our target audience.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Borton noted:
“The core principles of beautiful mobile-first design, intuitive user experiences, and integrated hardware and software have stayed the same while the surface area over which those principles are applied has grown. We will continue down that path. The end state we are building towards is a full stack solution for club owners (as opposed to a collection of loosely integrated point solutions).”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Borton cited:
“We recently crossed over 1.3 million end customer accounts and 1.5 million replays served. Those are both tangible measures of our mission of increasing the amount of fun being had in the world. Raising our Series A from Frontier Growth, one of the leading investors in Vertical SaaS companies, was both a milestone and a validation of the vision we are building towards.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Borton highlighted:
“If you want to see what a successful PodPlay club looks like, I’d suggest checking out our long form video series called The Joy of Pickleball. We send Kaitlyn Kerr to one pickleball club each quarter to spread the joy of pickleball, meet players from across the country, gather pickleball stories, and put her DUPR on the line in some friendly competition. The videos double as amazing video case studies of the PodPlay tech stack in action.”
“For written case studies, you can check out: Sharks Pool Club, Pickleball 365, and Gotham Pickleball.”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? Borton revealed:
“Revenue has tripled over the past year and we recently announced our $8 million Series A led by Frontier Growth.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Borton assessed:
“In the near term, we have two north star objectives:
- Winning the pickleball market. We are growing our market share in the fastest growing sport in the US, and making waves in other geographies where pickleball is taking off like the UK and Canada. We think this will be a winner-take-most market and we intend to become the default premium solution. Estimates vary given the fast growing nature of the market, but we think the end state for pickleball in the US is 5,000 – 10,000 dedicated locations, with the global market a multiple of that.
- Growing the Autonomous Experience category. PingPod was more than just a lighthouse client for PodPlay. It has been and continues to serve as a lab and showroom for the autonomous operating model powered by PodPlay. We are seeing the model spread and now serve autonomous venues in pickleball, pool, golf simulators, and even dog washes. If clubs want to operate autonomously, PodPlay is the default choice.
Longer term, we think the addressable market for PodPlay is defined by: experiences that take place in a physical space, require a reservation, can be augmented by video and social, and benefit from a reduction in labor cost.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Borton affirmed:
“Modern, intuitive, mobile-first user experiences. We care deeply about building with taste and tend to win the business of clubs who similarly value great user experiences.”
“Integrated hardware and software. We are the only fully integrated solution. All of the other video capture systems are point solutions that may or may not have loose integration with club management tools. Delivering the full stack is the key to making video capabilities frictionless. No need to scan a QR code, no need to download a separate app, no need for separate passwords. We take inspiration from how Apple combines hardware and software to produce magical experiences.”
“Autonomous mode. We created the category and have done hundreds of thousands of hours of reservations. This level of learning by doing will be hard for any competitor to replicate.”
“Empathy. “We started out as operators – building out a network of 20+ autonomous table tennis facilities. If you are going to build digital tools for physical spaces, there is no better way to learn what to build than managing physical spaces with technology. We deeply empathize with our customers because we have been one.”
