Being the whole technology function

Swish is software for pickleball and racquet clubs. It runs leagues, tournaments and club programming, and it has been doing it since 2021.

That description undersells the problem. A club running a league is running registration, payment collection, scheduling, court allocation, live scoring, bracket generation off a leaderboard, messaging to a few hundred members, and a rating submission to an external body afterwards. Most of that used to happen in spreadsheets and group chats. Swish replaced it with one system, then kept going: round robin in three variants, team formats, king of the court, ladder leagues, inter club play, day of event management from a phone, court booking through whichever system the club already uses, and automatic score upload into the sport's rating platform.

Getting there required more than an app. It required a technology organization.

What we have built with them

We have acted as Swish's technical co-founder rather than as a vendor to it. That has meant the mobile app, the customer facing website and the e-commerce platform, and it has also meant the parts nobody demos: security assessments, audits, the architecture decisions that get made once and constrain everything afterwards.

A club platform also cannot be an island. Swish integrates with the booking and management systems clubs already run on, including Court Reserve, PlayByPoint, RacquetDesk, PodPlay, Facility Ally and OpenCourt, and pushes scores into DUPR automatically. Every one of those is someone else's roadmap and someone else's release cycle. Building a product that depends on six external partners is a different engineering discipline to building a product that stands alone.

The market outgrew the architecture

In October 2025 Swish powered the World Pickleball Championships. In February 2026 it became the exclusive tournament platform for India's largest pickleball, padel and badminton events through a partnership with Hudle.

Growth like that arrives as a technical problem before it arrives as a commercial one. A platform built to take payments in one country cannot simply be pointed at another. Different markets run on different rails, and clubs in those markets expect to be paid the way their members already pay. The architectural answer is that each club holds its own payment account and receives funds directly, with the platform collecting only its own fee and never sitting in the middle of the money. That decision has to be made deliberately, early, and by somebody who has seen what happens when it is not.

Co-founders, not a project

Swish did not need a mobile app built. It needed a technology function that would still be making good decisions three years later, when the company had grown into problems nobody had described yet.

A project based vendor optimizes for the thing in front of them, because that is what they are paid for. The integration that will be painful in two years gets built the quick way. The payment architecture that will not survive a second country gets built for the first one. None of that is bad faith. It is what happens when the engagement ends before the consequences arrive.

Staying in as the technical side of the business changes the incentive completely. We are the ones who inherit our own architecture decisions, which is the only reliable way to make sure they are made properly the first time.

Swish is a Lincoln Labs portfolio company.

How other engagements were run.