SportAI acquires Padelytics to build AI platform for racket sports
What's the deal? Norwegian startup SportAI has acquired Padelytics, merging two AI-focused teams in the racket sports space. The combined company will build a hardware-agnostic platform delivering automated match analysis, performance metrics, and personalised coaching for padel, tennis, and pickleball.
Padelytics co-founder and chief executive Nenad Zivic, formerly of Meta, becomes chief product and technology officer at SportAI. CEO Lauren Pedersen continues to lead the combined group.
"This acquisition brings together two of the strongest AI companies in racket sports and significantly accelerates our ambition to build the defining AI platform for the industry," Pedersen said.
Why now? Padel is one of the world's fastest-growing sports. The International Padel Federation reports over 35 million active participants and a 42% year-over-year increase in federation-registered members. The teams announced the deal at the Padel World Summit in Barcelona, where they are showcasing their integrated technology roadmap.
By combining Padelytics' club-and-player-facing product with SportAI's API and computer vision infrastructure, the merged entity can reach a much broader market faster than either could alone.
What could go wrong? Merging two early-stage AI companies is no small feat — aligning product visions, tech stacks, and cultures rarely goes smoothly. The racket sports analytics market, while growing, remains niche compared to football or basketball, which could limit the platform's addressable audience.
Hardware-agnostic claims also face real-world friction: camera quality, court configurations, and club IT setups vary wildly across markets.
The signal: AI-powered sports analytics is moving beyond elite professional leagues into recreational and club-level play. The deal reflects a broader trend of startups targeting fast-growing participatory sports — padel, pickleball — where millions of amateur players represent an underserved market hungry for data-driven coaching tools.
Read more: ministryofsport.com
