58,300 Padel Courts In, Alejandro Betancourt López’s Playtomic Bet Pays Off

Among the investors who took positions in Playtomic is Alejandro Betancourt López. His stake traces to the company's 2022 purchase of rival GotCourt and the €200 million valuation it reached at the time. Three years on, the bet looks well-timed, and the company's own numbers explain why.

The Reservation Layer Beneath a Sport

Playtomic is the connective tissue between players and clubs. The app handles court bookings, matchmaking by skill level, scheduling, and the club-management software that keeps a venue full. A court earns money only when someone reserves it, and the platform that fills it takes a cut of the whole sport rather than one location.

The model fits a habit visible across Betancourt López's holdings. He has tended to back the asset every participant in a market has to touch, instead of the most visible piece of it. Owning the booking layer of a fast-growing sport works much like owning the permits a vehicle fleet needs to operate: value sits at the chokepoint, where demand has to pass through.

The scale behind the platform is already substantial. Playtomic reported gross revenues above €240 million in 2024, a 40% jump on the prior year, and now works with roughly 6,000 clubs and about 1.5 million active players a month across 63 countries, according to figures it released in March 2025. For a piece of consumer software, those are the kind of repeat-use numbers that turn a booking app into infrastructure.

The data underneath all that activity is its own asset. Every reservation, match, and skill rating feeds a picture of who plays where and how often, which clubs use to fill off-peak slots and which the platform uses to pair players of similar level. A standalone court has none of that. The result is a service that gets stickier the longer a club stays on it, and harder for a rival to pry loose.

Fresh Capital Aimed at America

In March 2025, Playtomic closed a €65 million round that combined €55 million in equity with a €10 million debt facility from Banco Santander. Match Invest, the vehicle led by chief executive Félix Ruiz, and the fund LFH led the raise, with Bonsai, Arconas, GP Bullhound, and FJ Labs also taking part. The company earmarked the money for product development and for one market in particular.

That market is the United States. Padel's growth has been lopsided, and the next leg points west. The U.S. added roughly 250 clubs and 330 courts in 2025, and Playtomic's report tags the country a "Diamond in the Rough," its label for places with early adoption and a long runway. Playtomic has already activated more than 50 U.S. clubs on its platform and projects the country will reach 3,000 courts by 2026.

American expansion changes the arithmetic for a business built on booking volume. More courts in high-traffic settings mean more reservations flowing through software, and the sport is moving into luxury wellness, hospitality, and mixed-use real estate rather than standalone clubs alone. Each new venue widens the base Playtomic earns from, which is why the U.S. matters more to the platform than to any single developer pouring concrete. The product roadmap tied to the raise points the same way, with upgrades to club-management tools, point-of-sale, tournaments, and the academy features that keep multi-venue operators on the system.

Courts as Real Estate, Software as Margin

Money in padel is pooling in two places: the physical buildout and the technology that runs it. Developers treat courts as a real-estate play that draws foot traffic and membership fees. The booking and payments layer earns a recurring cut without laying a single tile, and the equipment market around the sport has compounded at about 34% a year since 2019.

The split shapes how durable Betancourt López's position is. A rival can copy a court. Dislodging a reservation network with millions of players and thousands of clubs gets harder as it scales, because each new club makes the platform more useful to the next player, and each new player makes it more valuable to the next club. A network effect like that is the real asset, and it grows quietly while the courts get the attention.

The wager rests on two things holding. Padel has to keep spreading, especially in the U.S., and the layer organizing it has to keep compounding alongside the sport. A €240 million revenue base and a Santander-backed raise suggest both are happening at once, which is the outcome Alejandro Betancourt López was positioned for when he bought in well before the sport reached American soil.