Siddhant Jatia and the Picklebay Thesis
How a fourth-generation entrepreneur from a 120-year-old business family spotted a real estate arbitrage hiding inside India's fastest-growing participative sport.
It is close to midnight in Ahmedabad. A 20-court facility is running at full capacity. Not a single slot is free. Siddhant Jatia walked in around 8 PM a few weeks earlier to find half the courts occupied. He was told, matter-of-factly, to come back at 12:30 AM if he wanted to understand what this sport had become.
Ahmedabad now has over 500 pickleball courts. India has roughly 2,500. The United States has north of 50,000. For Siddhant, that gap is not a sporting statistic. It is the entire business.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The sport that makes the economics work
Pickleball started in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, invented by two friends with bored families and a backyard. For decades it was dismissed as a sport for older people. Then, sometime in the 2010s, it stopped being that.
It is played on a court the size of a badminton court. The paddle is flat and solid, slightly bigger than a table-tennis bat. The ball is plastic with holes, which limits bounce considerably compared to tennis. The serve must be underhand. Both sides must let the ball bounce before volleying in the opening exchange. A seven-foot “kitchen” zone near the net forces short, tactical play rather than power.
The things that make pickleball very age-agnostic and very easy to pick up are the two-bounce rule and the kitchen. Because of these, the sport becomes easy to play for anyone.
A 10-year-old and an 85-year-old can rally on the same court. Games take 45 minutes. You need four people. That accessibility is the commercial foundation of everything Siddhant is building.
The yield argument
The central insight Siddhant returns to is yield per square foot. A standard tennis court footprint can fit four pickleball courts. Four times the players, four times the bookings, on the same piece of land.
₹5–7L
Construction cost per court
₹9–10L
Gross monthly revenue, 4-court facility
8–10 months
Typical break-even period
All figures stated by Siddhant Jatia in the Founder Thesis podcast.
After rent, electricity, and manpower, a well-run four-court facility nets roughly ₹3 to ₹3.5 lakh a month. The total build is around ₹20 lakh. Divide one by the other and you have an 8-to-10-month payback. That is not a sports investment. It is a real estate monetisation strategy.
A lot of people look at this like a lottery ticket. But unless certain fundamentals are in place, the right location, the right income group nearby, the right construction standards, the end product isn’t great, and it takes a toll on the player experience.
The locations being converted are varied: hotel podiums, school grounds open for pay-and-play after hours, rooftops, and in one detail Siddhant mentions without much ceremony, legally disputed land parcels where owners can generate returns while proceedings continue. The infrastructure is modular. The payback does not wait.
When I suggested this sounded a lot like the co-working industry, Siddhant did not pause. “100%,” he said. “You take underutilised real estate, unitise it, earn more per square foot, and layer services on top.”
What Picklebay is actually building
Siddhant launched Picklebay in May 2025, bootstrapped from his own capital after seven months of development. The founding frustration was personal. He had become a regular player and found the entire ecosystem running on sprawling WhatsApp groups, unverified court listings, and events with no digital infrastructure.
The entire pickleball community was only on WhatsApp. People were finding courts, finding players. I saw a real business here. I wanted to go vertically down, not multi-sport, and create a tech stack that solves the pain points I personally faced as a player first.
Picklebay now lists 650 to 700 courts across seven cities. The platform physically verifies each facility, flagging courts that fall short of regulation dimensions. That verification is not a feature. It is the product. There is an infrastructure pipeline of 750 courts from operators seeking construction consultancy, and Siddhant says he is engaging at least 10,000 players across the company’s own WhatsApp communities.
On the software side, Picklebay has built a Tournament Management System (TMS) that digitises the entire event lifecycle, already deployed in the Picklebay India Tournament Series 2025. A Venue Management System (VMS) is in pilot ahead of a mid-2026 rollout, giving venue owners dynamic pricing tools and occupancy analytics. Siddhant describes the logic simply: “It’s like an airline managing inventory. You’re optimising yield end of the day.”
The missing layer he is building toward is larger. In hospitality, channel management software gives a hotel owner one interface to update rates across all booking platforms simultaneously. In sports, no such layer exists. Every aggregator, Huddle, District by Zomato, Playo, gives operators a separate backend. Siddhant wants to build the system above all of them.
The longer logic follows from there. Once the tech stack is proven for pickleball, you launch PaddleBay for padel, ShuttleBay for badminton. Vertical depth first, horizontal replication second.
Why this moment matters
In April 2025, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports officially recognised the Indian Pickleball Association as the sport’s National Sports Federation. The Delhi High Court upheld that status in February 2026. With NSF recognition, the IPA can now sanction leagues, standardise coaching certifications, and build toward Olympic inclusion, which the global pickleball community is targeting for 2032 or 2036. India has submitted a letter of intent to host the 2036 Summer Olympics in Ahmedabad. The alignment is not accidental.
Siddhant’s cultural argument for the sport is worth taking seriously.
Pickleball has the potential to become the new gully cricket of urban India. When we were growing up, you’d call your friends, play a quick game in the evening, spend an hour and a half. You didn’t need anything. That’s what gully cricket was. Pickleball is that, but organised and built for the city.
Gully cricket has largely disappeared from urban India. Space is gone, scheduling is hard, and you cannot get eleven people to commit. Pickleball needs four. It costs roughly ₹250 a head split across a booking. It requires no prior athletic ability and no serious fitness. Siddhant thinks it can become the second most-played sport in India by participation, not spectatorship, not leagues. Just by the number of people actually playing.
He has been building for a year. The sport is still in its early urban phase, still played primarily by upper-middle-class India. The infrastructure, the software, the governing body, the Olympic conversation, and the wellness shift among younger generations are all moving in the same direction. Siddhant’s bet is simply that he built the rails before the train arrived.
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