Playtomic, the Madrid-based international racket sports platform, scales up and reinforces its brand in Finland after acquiring the racket sport business from SL Systems Oy, previously carried out as the sports venue management and court booking platform play.fi. With this transaction, Playtomic moves from market leader to dominant player in the Finnish market for padel and tennis software. The Finnish solution play.fi provides safe and efficient booking, payment, and handling of matches for padel and tennis in almost 1,000 courts from Finnish clubs.
Playtomic has, during its five years, rapidly expanded around the world to become the leading racket sports platform. The startup is now an international movement with more than 4,600 clubs connected and over one million users all over the world. The business has, alongside its organic growth, been accelerating its international expansion with several acquisitions, marking this addition the 10th since early 2021.
“The deal further strengthens Playtomic´s existing footprint in Finland as we are obtaining 95% of the market share, and it allows us to address the surge in popularity of padel and to digitalize the tennis industry in the country.”, says Pablo Carro, Co-Founder of Playtomic.
Highway to the north
The Nordic countries are high-priority markets for Playtomic. To reflect the importance of the region and to meet its specific needs and opportunities, a new Nordic organization was established during the second part of 2021. The team of 16 people, led by Gustaf Wiiburg, covers sales, marketing, customer care, and community growth.
“The Finnish market is currently in a strong growth phase with signs of an early tendency of consolidation and multi-venue chains. Our unique combination of having a local organization fueled with knowledge, experience and insight from developing padel business in more than 30 markets at various maternity phases, is extremely beneficial, for example for companies with the intention to expand their business, both on national level or internationally”, adds Wiiburg.
After this acquisition, the 120 play.fi customers will benefit from the scale of the world’s largest community of racket sport players, while the local team will keep ensuring customer proximity and excellent service. The seamless booking experience, superior matchmaking, and player leveling that the Playtomic app offers, will improve the user experience for the 170,000 players that will be migrated to the new system.
