SportzContest started because a school sports day fell apart over a missing registration sheet. Seven years later we run 18,400+ events a year — from inter-house relays in Nashik to national robotics finals in Bengaluru.
In December 2018, Nikhil Deshpande volunteered at his old school's annual sports day in South Delhi. Two hundred children, eleven events, and one clipboard holding every entry. The clipboard went missing an hour before the 100m heats.
What followed was four hours of shouting names across a field, three parents in an argument about heat allocations, and a prize distribution that ended after dark. The teachers had done nothing wrong. The tooling was simply a stack of photocopies and a WhatsApp group with 340 unread messages.
Nikhil called Ritika Menon, a product designer he had worked with at a payments company, the same night. By August 2019 the two of them had shipped a single-page registration tool to four schools in Greater Kailash and Gurugram. It did exactly one thing — it kept the entry list alive and searchable on a phone.
The first paying customer, Rosewood Public School, asked for QR check-in three weeks later. A gymkhana in Kolhapur asked for live scoring. A college fest convenor in Bengaluru asked whether nine judges could score 4,300 entries without a spreadsheet. Every feature on the platform today traces back to somebody standing on a field with a problem.
We still build that way. Roughly a third of our team has personally run a large event, and every engineer spends at least two event days a year on the ground with a customer — scanning passes, entering scores, watching where things break.
Founded
2019
Greater Kailash, New Delhi
Team today
118
Across 4 cities + remote
A PT teacher with one laptop should be able to run an event as cleanly as a national federation with a full secretariat. That gap is the whole reason we exist.
Every score has an author and a timestamp. Blind judging panels, tamper-proof audit trails and vote-integrity checks are not premium add-ons — they ship on every plan, because a disputed result ruins an event faster than bad weather.
Dusty fields, 3 a.m. setups, patchy 4G and volunteers who got the app five minutes ago. If a feature does not survive that, it does not ship. Offline-first is a design principle here, not a checkbox.
Our free plan is not a trap with a 14-day timer. A 90-child village athletics meet gets the same registration engine, QR check-in and leaderboard as a state championship. Growth follows trust, in that order.
Sports days cluster in December and February. Fests peak in September. We freeze risky deploys during peak weeks and staff a live war-room instead. Our roadmap follows the Indian academic year, not a quarterly slide.
Most of our participants are minors. Records live in Indian data centres, consent is captured per guardian, and we hold DPDP-aligned retention rules that delete what an event no longer needs. We do not sell data. Ever.
Every organiser gets a human on WhatsApp within 12 minutes on an event day — not a ticket number. Support sits in the same room as engineering, and the escalation path from a panicked convenor to a fix is two people long.
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Organisations run events with us
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States and union territories served
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People on the SportzContest team
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Certificates issued and verified
We have never taken a growth shortcut that would have made an event day riskier. The list on the right is deliberately unglamorous — most of it is infrastructure that organisers only notice when it is missing.
₹64 crore raised across three rounds
Backed by Deccan Early Stage Partners, Tricolour Ventures and a group of angels who between them have run the operations of two national sporting federations. We are not chasing a valuation headline — we are chasing renewal rates, which sat at 91% last season.
Incorporated in August in New Delhi. Rosewood Public School becomes customer number one, paying ₹6,000 for its December sports day. 1,140 registrations processed in the first season.
With grounds shut, we rebuilt for online contests — quizzes, art, singing, coding. Judges dashboards and weighted public voting were born here. 640 virtual events kept the lights on and taught us how to score anything.
After a Kolhapur meet lost network for 40 minutes, we shipped local-queue scanning with automatic reconciliation. Seed round of ₹9 crore closed in November. Team crosses 30 people.
UPI-first collections with T+2 settlement go live. Krishna University runs a 40-event fest end to end. First ₹10 crore of participant fees flows through the platform in a single season.
Maharashtra Athletics moves its full state calendar onto SportzContest. Series A of ₹41 crore led by Tricolour Ventures. Zonal field crews stand up in the west, south and east; support goes 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week.
Bulk certificate generation with QR verification crosses one million issued. Medal, trophy and prize-distribution logistics launch with courier partners in 180 cities. Uptime on event days: 99.97%.
The open event calendar lets participants discover contests near them. Regional language support for Hindi, Marathi and Tamil rolls out. 2,400+ organisations now run their season on the platform.
Eight of us hold the weekly operations review. All eight have worked an event day this season.
Co-founder & CEO
Twelve years in payments and lending infrastructure before this. Still personally runs the war-room desk on the first Saturday of December.
Co-founder & CPO
Designs for the volunteer who has thirty seconds and one hand free. Led the offline check-in rebuild that became our most-used feature.
Chief Technology Officer
Joined from a ticketing platform in Bengaluru. Owns the peak-load architecture that carried 61,000 concurrent scoreboard viewers last February.
VP, Customer Success
Former sports administrator at a Pune university. Built the 12-minute event-day response promise and the volunteer training kit behind it.
VP, Engineering
Runs a 44-engineer org across New Delhi and remote. Believes deploy freezes during December are a feature of the culture, not a limitation.
Head of Sales
Spent nine years selling to schools across Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Insists every deal starts with watching the customer's last event recording.
Head of Trust & Data
Ex-privacy counsel. Wrote our guardian-consent model for minors and keeps the retention clock honest across every school account.
Head of Event Operations
Coordinates the on-ground crew for championship-tier events. Has personally set up scoring desks at 240 venues since 2022.
Institutions and organisers who trust us with their season
I have bought software from a dozen vendors in fifteen years. This is the first one whose product head turned up at our ground at six in the morning to watch us use it.
We moved an entire state calendar — 31 championships, nine districts — onto their platform in one off-season. Nobody at the federation has asked for the old files back.
Our CSR sports drive reaches 40 villages. Their team built us a low-bandwidth entry flow without charging a rupee extra because, in their words, that was the point of the product.
Twenty minutes with an events specialist. We will set up your hardest category live on the call — heats, judges, tie-breaks and all.