Neogen Capital, 450,000 Euro investment in RacketPal

Cristina Blanaru Business, Digital & Media, Start Up

Neogen Capital invested Euro 450,000 in RacketPal, startup founded in London by two Romanians, from which one a former performance player. The startup helps people with a passion for sports like tennis, badminton, squash, ping pong or padel to find suited partners. The money will go mainly to increase and develop the app continuously and to increase the operational team, with the target being 100,000 registered users on the platform by the end of the year.

Launched in 2019, RacketPal is already used by over 10,000 Android and iOS users, with a daily average of 300.

Robert Rizea, CEO & cofounder RacketPal, former performance tennis player until 2016

Those who access RacketPal are people with passion for tennis, badminton, ping pong, squash or padel who do not alwats have whom to play a game. The idea of the app came from this need. Me and my business partner, Bogdan Demeny, two regular people, sports fans, moved to London, realized it is hard to find a nearby sports partner to be compatible with in terms of play level. We spoke with hundreds of passionate players and we discovered they have the same problem, which confirmed the need for such a solution to help people to meet up to play their favorite game

We wish also to start monetizing the platform. In the next year, we want to access a new investment rund, that will allow us to scale and expand to other countries and towards other sports. Then we hope to reach 1M registered users and the plans will be much bigger and at global level. Until now, the main obstacles we faced were hiring and finding new people. I believe anyone can manage anything if he has a team of smart and passionate people close. And it is hard to find this kind of people. We were and are lucky to have a superteam, from the smallest to the biggest one

Until now, Robert Rizea and Bogdan Demeny invested over Euro 230.000 in developing RacketPal, with the target for the current year being 100,000 users in London and UK.

According to the founders, RacketPal will become, on long term, the biggest online platform with sport passioned people in the world, with 100M registered users and anyone, anywhere in the world, can find a nearby partner to play with, in just a few clicks.