Soul Padel raises £3.6m at £30m valuation, no VC involved
Three family offices have backed the Manchester padel operator's plan to go from four clubs to ten in a year. Six of the new sites already have planning permission.
Soul Padel has raised £3.6 million from three family offices, valuing the Manchester-based operator at £30 million. The round was announced on Tuesday.
The money combines fresh cheques from existing shareholders with new investors. None of the three offices has been named.
The stated plan is to go from four live clubs to ten within 12 months.
Six of those clubs already have planning permission: Ayr, Washington, Warrington, Preston, Wigan and Rochdale. That is the part of a physical rollout that usually decides whether a timetable survives.
The four operating sites are in Stockport, St Helens, Braehead and at Loughborough University. The first opened in 2024.
The company says its clubs are profitable, with utilisation consistently above 80 per cent across both competitive and less mature local padel markets. Those are its own figures, and no accounts have been published alongside them.
Longer term, Soul Padel is aiming for 250 courts nationwide by 2032.
The demand side is easier to check. Lawn Tennis Association figures published in May put the number of padel players in Britain at one million, across 1,825 courts at 551 venues.
That is up from 860,000 players at the end of 2025 and 400,000 at the end of 2024. The sport has also drawn celebrity money, with Stormzy taking a stake in rival operator Padel Social Club.
Soul Padel's pitch to its backers rests on programmes as well as concrete. It began giving schools free access to padel in 2024 through a scheme called What's That Racket?, and added dedicated women's and over-50s communities, Soul Sisters and Soul Timers, in early 2025.
A loyalty platform, Soul Mates, launched in summer 2025 and reached 12,000 members in its first year, according to the company. It says the resulting first-party data now shapes which towns, sites and partners it targets.
Chief executive and founder Mark Hewlett said the next 12 months would not produce ten identical venues.
For founders building anything with a lease and a fit-out cost, the source of the money is the interesting bit. UK tech funding hit $15.3 billion in the first half of 2026, but that capital is concentrating in fewer, larger rounds, and a four-site regional leisure business is not the shape venture funds are chasing.
Family offices priced this one instead, and they priced it on unit economics and planning consents rather than growth curves. If the utilisation figure holds, the next 12 months will show whether a model proven in four towns transfers to six more.