E149: Smart Courts, Sports Tech & the Future of Tennis | Zenniz

Eero, welcome to this Founders' Corner and you are kind of straight from Brazil back to work in Finland and preparing for other big missions in France, maybe Portugal. So how is it going so far since the 6 million round and the US expansion plan and idea?

Thank you, yeah. It's going really well. Like you mentioned, I just came from Brazil. We had a Brazilian distributor who also joined the funding round. We had a tournament with the French Federation, Roland Garros running it in Sao Paulo. We had our system there. That was the first time for me in South America as well. That was amazing. Really good impression to everybody involved. So we are following up now during the Roland Garros French Open tournament. And everything is growing at a fast pace. A lot of positive problems to tackle, but that's what we've been waiting for. So it's wonderful. Really looking forward to what the rest of the year brings.

How do you navigate that whole fast pace? As you mentioned, you're looking into different markets and then everything is way more faster than before. Do you work on expanding the team or working on the system?

After closing the funding round at the end of the year, we did do quite a few recruitments and it's a learning process for us. So we are just figuring out everything. So we opened up the US market last year and we're really successful with that. Now we have a US HQ. In Atlanta, we just got the visas, so we're able to relocate one of our key members to the US now. We're just taking it step by step and just trying to kind of manage with all of the momentum going on.

Amazing. One thing at a time. So what would you say is your mode right now in the market and what kind of problem you are solving? Is it for players, for coaches, for federations?

Yeah, so really our differentiation is that we have a system that covers both recreational play, tournaments, high performance, and it's just something that resonates super well in the market. We have partnership with key academies. Like I mentioned, the French Federation is now interested in talking with us. So it's just building this whole brand and awareness and reputation. That's I think really working well for us. It helps that we are also, we have the only system that's all in one and can provide all of these features. So our competitors are focusing on a much narrower piece of the pie. So yeah, there's technological advantages, but I wouldn't downplay the importance of the branding and just the reputation that we've been building.

That's amazing. How did you get into the field and decide to, well, I'm going to solve now the problem in the tennis world?

Well, I've been playing tennis all my life, so my parents are very passionate players as well. And nice detail is that my father actually in the 60s, he made a line calling system, like a prototype version of something similar to what we did. He never made it into a product, but he made it into World Tennis Magazine. There's an article with him and two of his friends from university. So in a sense, this is now the second generation in trying to solve this problem.

Wow, that's amazing. So you were like, okay, let's continue solving the problem. Like what