Siddhant Jatia on Pickleball's Rise in India

Picklebay Founder Siddhant Jatia walks Founder Thesis host Akshay Datt through the full pickleball business in India model - from rooftop conversions and court construction costs to tournament prize pools and the platform layer that no one has built yet. Siddhant Jatia grew up inside a 120-year-old Kolkata business family and started working at 16, but it took a single session of pickleball to set him on the path to building Picklebay, India's first end-to-end pickleball platform, which now lists 700 verified courts across six cities and has developed proprietary venue management and tournament software to solve what he calls a critical information asymmetry harming venue investors. In this conversation, Siddhant unpacks three counterintuitive ideas: that the explosive growth of the pickleball business in India is fundamentally a yield-per-square-foot real estate story, that in this sport the spectators are almost entirely the same people as the players - upending conventional sponsorship logic entirely - and that the largest gap in Indian sports tech is a channel management layer that aggregates all the booking aggregators, the same way hotel software syncs rates across MakeMyTrip and Booking.com. With the Indian Pickleball Association now officially recognised as a National Sports Federation and India actively bidding for the 2036 Olympics, this conversation sits at a genuine inflection point for the sport and the businesses being built around it. 👉How a single tennis court footprint converts into four pickleball courts, multiplying player throughput and generating ₹9-10 lakh in gross monthly revenue at 60 percent occupancy across an 18-hour operating window 👉Why the ₹20 lakh total investment required to build a four-court pickleball venue in India typically pays back in 8-10 months, making it one of the shortest real estate payback timelines in sports infrastructure today 👉What Siddhant Jatia identifies as the single biggest missing layer in Indian sports tech - a channel management system equivalent to what hotels use, that aggregates all booking platforms into one unified inventory and pricing dashboard for venue owners 👉Why Ahmedabad runs its 500-plus pickleball courts to full capacity past midnight every night, and what this demand signal reveals about where the next wave of venue investment in India's pickleball business should go 👉How the Indian Pickleball Association's recognition as a National Sports Federation in 2024 is set to unlock government funding, standardised coaching certification, and a national ranking system for the first time in the sport's India history 👉What separates a profitable pickleball venue from an expensive mistake - the specific location, construction, and community factors Jatia says most new operators overlook entirely Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel

You can listen to Siddhant Jatia on Pickleball's Rise in India online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Siddhant Jatia on Pickleball's Rise in India is an episode from Founder Thesis by Akshay Datt.

This episode is 51:00 long.

This episode was published on Apr 27, 2026.

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