Nihal Pradeep, a former national-level basketball player, is on a mission to transform youth sports in India and beyond through Dartle, a B2B SaaS platform that acts as an “operating system” for sports academies.
The spark: A player’s frustration with broken pathways
Nihal’s entrepreneurial journey began not in a boardroom, but on the basketball court. Starting in 2005, he developed a deep passion for the sport recording NBA games, practising moves, and dreaming of a professional career. But like many young athletes in India, he quickly realised there was no clear pathway from grassroots talent to professional opportunities. “The vision for us with Dartle is to create equal pathways for athletes whenever they want to try and pursue a profession in sport,” Nihal explains. He likened the problem to the engineering education system in India: while IITs provide a structured, recognised route for aspiring engineers, sports lacked an equivalent ecosystem. Dartle was born out of this gap—a platform to level the playing field for athletes by bringing structure, data, and visibility to youth sports development.
Building Dartle: Solving real pain points for academies
Dartle is not just another sports app. It’s a vertical B2B SaaS platform tailored specifically for youth sports and football academies, combining operations management, scheduling, player analytics, and parent engagement into one unified system.
The problem Dartle solves
Youth sports academies typically juggling fragmented administrative portals, video taggers, spreadsheets, and messaging apps . This fragmentation creates silos, wastes coaching time, and leaves parents out of the loop—leading to high attrition rates (over 50% of players drop out annually, often due to unstructured training and invisible progress).
Dartle’s solution
Dartle replaces these fragmented tools with a single platform that:
- Manages training sessions and scheduling
- Tracks player performance with AI-driven analytics (including a proprietary “Dartle Score” for scouting)
- Automates fee management and payments
- Provides real-time feedback reports to parents and players
The result? Academies report, based on early deployment data across our pilot academies, operations teams saw up to 75% reduction in administrative workload, tripling athlete retention, and freeing up coaches to focus on what matters most: developing players on the field.
Overcoming adoption friction in a traditional industry
One of Dartle’s biggest challenges was getting traditional sports academies—often run by coaches with limited tech exposure—to adopt new technology. Nihal recognised that the key was reducing friction. “We realised something critical: we aren’t just solving an administrative problem. We are giving academies their time back,” he says. The COVID-19 pandemic, paradoxically, opened doors. With in-person meetings impossible, Nihal and his team used the time to connect with industry leaders globally, refine their product based on market feedback, and make the platform as frictionless as possible—even for part-time coaches with minimal tech skills.
Global expansion: From Kerala to the US, Middle East, and beyond
Founded in 2019 by Nihal Pradeep, Swathi Krishnan, and Nagaraj R Potti under Roninaks Sports Private Limited, Dartle started with friends-and-family funding before raising a $100,000 seed round in June 2026 led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). The startup has already expanded its customer base to:
- India
- United States (eight paid pilots in the American market)
- Middle East
- Kenya
- Nepal
Dartle currently serves 14 academies globally and recently secured a $60,000 MLS Next sponsorship. The company aims to onboard over 100 sports academies and reach an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of nearly $1 million within the next year.
Long-term vision: Creating an IIT-like ecosystem for sports
Nihal’s ambition extends far beyond software. He envisions Dartle as the backbone of a transformed sports ecosystem—one where every athlete, regardless of background, has access to structured development, data-driven insights, and recruitment opportunities. He cites the UK’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) as a model for what Dartle could enable in India and globally. “We want to be the change drivers to transform the sporting ecosystem in our country,” Nihal says.
Advice for founders: Validate before you build
For aspiring entrepreneurs, Nihal’s advice is straightforward: validate the problem before building the solution. “Most youth sports centers get trapped in a mountain of fragmented tools, manual scheduling, and paperwork. Every minute spent fighting an administrative fire is a minute taken away from developing a young athlete,” he notes. Dartle’s success lies in solving a real, painful problem for a specific audience: academy directors and coaches rather than chasing shiny technology for its own sake.
The road ahead
With fresh capital from IPV, Dartle plans to:
- Expand its go-to-market strategy in the US.
- Strengthen AI integrations for deeper player insights.
- Deepen partner engagements and scale globally.
As Nihal puts it: “When you remove the friction of running the business, academies unlock a level of impact they never could before.” For a country like India, where sports talent often goes unnoticed due to lack of infrastructure and visibility, Dartle represents more than just a startup—it’s a step toward creating fair, data-driven pathways for the next generation of athletes.
Interview By : Sejal Thakur
