Private equity just bought pickle ball
Apollo just spent $225 million on a structured investment in a company called Pickeball Inc.
On May 1, Apollo Sports Capital led a $225 million structured investment into Pickleball Inc. (literally, that’s what it’s called), the new holding company that now sits on top of the Carvana PPA Tour, Major League Pickleball, retailer Pickleball Central, the tournament-software business Pickleball Play Solutions, the Pickleball.com/Pickleball TV media stack, court-builder Just Courts, and equity stakes in Picklr and DUPR. Tom Dundon (via Dundon Capital Partners) and the Pardoe family keep majority control. CNBC pegged the post-money valuation at roughly $750 million.
Every wire ran the same lede: pickleball graduates from pandemic novelty to “tier-one sport,” validated by one of the largest credit-and-PE shops on earth (Apollo, NYSE: APO, ~$938B AUM). That framing is fine for the SFIA crowd, but it’s not the full story that we plan to tell ours.
The asset isn’t the league. It’s the ecosystem.
Strip the league glamour and look at what actually generated the $140M. The durable, recurring, high-margin pieces are not the pro tour:
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