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The founders of Topgolf and Puttshack have raised $34mn of seed capital from investors, including billionaire Blackstone executive David Blitzer and the Daily Mail’s investment arm, for a venture aiming to invigorate the game of pool.
The funding round for Poolhouse, a “tech-enabled” version of the table-top game, has also attracted backing from New York-based VC fund Sharp Alpha and Simon Sports, co-owner of English football club Ipswich Town.
Alongside Blitzer, who has stakes in teams in the premier US football, basketball and hockey leagues and football’s English Premier League, the investor group includes some early backers of the operator of Soho House private members club and F1 Arcade, a Formula 1-themed entertainment space.
The new business has been developed by Steve and Dave Jolliffe, the British twins who built Topgolf, an international chain of “gamified” driving ranges that was acquired by golf equipment manufacturer Callaway for $2.1bn. They also developed Puttshack, a high-tech version of minigolf, with Adam Breeden, founder of F1 Arcade, darts chain Flight Club and All Star Lanes bowling alleys.
Poolhouse involves pool tables, balls and cues, but adds tracking technology and video projections to overlay additional features, such as bonus targets and obstacles. The team behind it also includes Paul Hawkins, founder of sports technology company Hawk-Eye.
“It’s going be very difficult to replicate what they’ve built”, said Poolhouse chief executive Andrew O’Brien. “They’ve taken a Nokia 3210 and created an iPhone for every pool table on the planet.”
The company’s first 20-table venue is due to open early next year opposite London’s Liverpool Street station, the busiest rail terminal in the UK. Those behind it promise a “vintage Las Vegas” feel, with food and drink available.
Poolhouse will join an increasingly crowded market for so-called competitive-socialising venues, with rival chains offering tech-powered cricket, bowling, darts and virtual clay-pigeon shooting. Some have described London as the industry’s ‘Silicon Valley’, with several concepts tested in the city before global rollouts.
“I just love the competitive-socialising sector” compared with traditional food and beverage venues, said O’Brien, a former Credit Suisse investment banker. “You’re adding a revenue stream which is near 100 per cent gross margin.”
Real estate agency Savills says the market in the UK alone has grown by 40 per cent since 2018, and calls it “the biggest development the leisure sector has seen in decades”. It estimates 800 competitive-socialising venues will dot the country by 2029, fuelled by changing consumer habits, such as less alcohol being drunk among young people.
After opening in London, Poolhouse plans to focus its efforts on the US. It has also signed up a franchise partner in Australia, Signature Hospitality Group, in a model it hopes to emulate elsewhere.
It plans to sell its equipment to pubs, bars, casinos and hotels, so that these venues can recreate the Poolhouse experience with their existing pool tables. Lloyd Danzig, managing partner at Sharp Alpha, said his firm had been attracted by the high margins from selling Poolhouse’s “white-label technology [which allows a licensee to rebrand and sell a developer’s tech as their own] that modernises any pool table into a dynamic digital-entertainment hub”.
