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Podcast: Founder Thesis
Episode:

Siddhant Jatia on Pickleball's Rise in India
Category: Business
Duration: 00:51:00
Publish Date: 2026-04-27 06:30:00
Description:

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.  
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