Jatin Paranjape, a retired cricketer who later worked in sports marketing, discovered a few gaps in India’s sports business that could be targeted and addressed. Being a part of the industry for more than a decade Paranjape realized the process of finding and learning a sport, searching for an apt field, acquiring the equipment etc., was not a simple process.
With the aim of aggregating all the sports values on one platform, Paranjape founded Khelomore in 2017.
Khelomore is a sports tech company based out of Mumbai that offers pay and play to its users. The platform allows its users to play and learn a sport by offering services like booking a venue, aggregating coaches, and events for specific sports, and offering a marketplace where sports equipment can be bought and sold.
The platform also introduced a new program called KheloMore@home- this is targeted at the audience who want to train and play sports in their own housing societies. Paranjape created this program after finding that the majority of Indians who are also interested in sports live in gated societies.
The platform is currently available in five cities which includes Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Ahmedabad and aims to expand to over 20 cities this year.
Khelomore currently focuses on around 15 sports and works with more than 1500 coaches. In order to expand its network of coaches, the company is working in partnership with national sports federations to onboard registered coaches.
The platform’s revenue model is through earning commissions per transaction be it booking coaches, venues or even purchasing items through its online marketplace.
The platform has about one lakh monthly active users and a total of around five lakh users. The founder said that the platform has also seen a rise in the number of bookings received per month from 3500 in July 2021 to 12,000 in November 2022.
The sports tech company raised its pre-series A funding round which saw participation from angel investors like Gaurav Deepak, Shripad Nadkarni, Vijay Taparia, Vinay Sanghi and venture capitals such as Dream Sports in 2020 and Damera Ventures in 2022.
India’s sports industry was valued at Rs 95 billion in 2021. The company majorly faces competition from Playo and Hudle which are in its pay and play vertical.
