Eleven years ago Hanno Lippitsch pitched me an idea: booking a sports court should not require a phone call. I recognized the potential on the spot and did what I could do about it, which was everything I had: I took the whole team into my office in Vienna, wrote the first prototype, and joined as a founding shareholder. This month that company announced that Verdane, one of Europe's specialist growth investors, has taken a majority stake to accelerate its international expansion.
I was the co-founder and CTO in the first year. I left early, in 2014, for personal reasons. Pride, it turns out, does not expire with your cap table position.
Look at the journey the team went on after the early rounds we set up: expansion into Germany and Switzerland in 2016. A €5 million Series A in 2018. Joining forces with Appointman in Germany and Fitmanager in the Netherlands in 2019. A brutal pandemic for anyone whose business was physical sports venues, answered with online streaming and a video library. Then consolidation of the category, with studios moving over from Fitogram and racket sports networks connecting through Matchpoint.
Today the platform serves thousands of studios across nine countries, and the marketplace connects hundreds of thousands of people making millions of bookings.
Here is what this milestone confirms for me, and it is the same lesson I keep relearning in every company since: the technology was never the point. The first prototype I wrote is ancient history. What survived is the thing it enabled: studios that run their business in one place, and more people moving, playing and training. Build the growth engine, not the monument.
Congratulations to Hanno and the entire team. Eleven years is what an overnight success actually looks like.
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