Booking a padel court in Spain used to mean working the phone. Pablo Carro, Félix Ruiz and Pedro Clavería had to call club after club to find a free slot for a match, El Español reported. They built an app to fix it in 2017.

That app became Playtomic. Alejandro Betancourt López’s résumé lists him as one of its founding partners.

2017 to 2019: A Booking App Finds Its Clubs

Growth came club by club. By April 2019, more than 50,000 users had joined. They could book more than 2,500 football fields, padel courts and tennis courts at 600 clubs, EU-Startups reported. Clubs in Portugal, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden had signed on as clients.

Playtomic raised €6 million that spring from Optimizer Invest and GP Bullhound, along with private investors. “We believe they have what it takes to build a world class mobile consumer experience,” said Per Roman, a co-founder of GP Bullhound.

2021: Alejandro Betancourt López’s Padel Bet Scales Up

Playtomic raised €56 million in December 2021 in a Series C led by GP Bullhound, with Ruiz, Claret Capital Partners and Optimizer Invest taking part. That was more than nine times the 2019 round. The platform had more than 1 million active players in 34 countries. It worked with more than 4,000 clubs and employed 150 people.

Clavería, a founder and co-chief executive, said the product “helps make match-making and the booking experience frictionless.”

Alejandro Betancourt has described his early-stage bets as a matter of being near the right founders at the right moment. “I was very lucky to be with the right people at the right time,” he said in early 2022, two months after the Series C closed.

Italy and Beyond

Playtomic bought Sportclubby, an Italian rival that brought roughly 300,000 more users and lifted the combined base to about 1.5 million, El Español reported in January 2024. Italy alone had more than 2,000 clubs and some 500,000 players, according to Playtomic.

Its headcount had passed 150 by then, spread across nine offices. The paper named the United States, Switzerland and Italy as its main markets and reported turnover of €150 million in 2022. For Alejandro Betancourt López, Playtomic sits next to Hawkers and Auro as one of the Spanish companies he has backed since their early years. “We did Playtomic, which is the largest padel operator in the world,” he said in a later interview.