PLATFORM Golf wants to reinvent off-course golf.

Platform Golf Raises $5 Million

PLATFORM Golf, an Irish-co-founded golf technology business, which was set up a decade ago, has created a full-patented product that allows golfers to experience accurate putting with a unique uneven lie solution for off-course golf.

It can be adjusted to replicate even the most difficult greens, allowing players to practice year-round and improve their strokes by tracking ball movement.

Rory Flanagan, co-founder and chief commercial officer with the company, told The Currency: "This investment has allowed us to hire a group of extremely talented individuals. We also have been working on a full rebrand and product road map which moves us towards a more modular, mass-market design. We have been very much a US business but the raise will enable us to scale internationally which is exciting."

PLATFORM Golf has selected its investors to help it grow. "It is a real who's who of investors from David Shapiro, co-founder of KPS Capital, who led the turnaround of TaylorMade and Keith Bank, founder of Club Champion," Flanagan said.

"David and Keith are two of the most highly-respected investors in golf. We also worked with two VC firms who put together SPVs on either side of the Atlantic. One of those is with Liquidity out of NYC and one with CircleRock Capital, internationally. Recently another SPV has come on board which includes Jack Pierse, formerly of Wayflyer, Conor Lyden of Trustap and Daniel Hallisey." 

KPS Capital has more than $21 billion under management. Its investment in TaylorMade, the iconic golf equipment brand, won dealmaking prizes as it bought the business for $425 million in 2017 and successfully turned it around before selling it for $1.7 billion in 2021. 

Dublin- and London-based CircleRock has invested syndicate capital in restaurant software company Nory, gifting platform &Open, virtual fitness company FitXR and many other tech companies. The firm was founded by Conor Sharpe and Barry O'Neill.

Liquidity is run by a former investment banker who became known as the "fin-meme-Lord" for his anonymous satirical posts on an Instagram account that has more than 850,000 followers. In February, The Financial Times revealed the identity of the man behind the account as Hank Medina who has made numerous judicious early stage investments in companies as diverse as OpenAI to health insurance start-up TrueClaim.

PLATFORM Golf's ambitions to become a global business are exciting, but it is by no means a raw start-up.

It was founded in 2014 by Robb Gibb, a golf expert who then called it The Putting Perfection Platform. In its early years, the business was family-owned with a product that was available only on a small scale. 

In 2016, it rebranded as Perfection Platforms and started to scale. "The company began to modernise, expand and gain a real cult status among putting coaches and professionals around the USA," Flanagan said. "I was approached in 2017 about helping with scale and bringing a little more credibility when it came to the professional game, given my background of working with elite professional golfers as an agent for Hambric Sports.

"Fast-forward almost eight years and here we are. We have now rebranded as PLATFORM Golf, we are rapidly scaling up the business significantly and we have assembled a world-class team. We are very excited about the opportunities ahead and the progress we have made to this point."

Working with top talent

Flanagan has worked in the golf industry for 15 years after training as a commercial lawyer. "I always was drawn towards sports and working with top talent," he said. "Sadly, I wasn't good enough to be the talent but I wanted to be as close to the talent as possible.

"Around 2009, I started moonlighting as a sports lawyer, initially working with some Dublin-based agencies across various sports. I then started to support a smaller agency that was working in golf and really began to appreciate the scale and opportunity of golf as a business," he added.

"Golf is a truly global sport played by all demographics and really enjoyed by the top one per cent. It was clear to me that it was a safe space to position myself career-wise. I started working for a Dallas-based golf agency called Hambric Sports and worked my way up to VP, effectively running their business internationally."

Who did Flanagan work with? "I was fortunate to be part of a team that worked with Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Scottie Scheffler, Francesco Molinari, Tommy Fleetwood, Thorbjørn Olesen and many more highly talented golfers," he replied. "In 2017, I was introduced to my fellow PLATFORM co-founder, Thomas Hackett, who wanted to show me this great idea about a moving platform that was going to change how golf was played and practised on forever.

"I remember initially rolling my eyes and thinking 'here we go', but he was relentless and we met a few times. We finally sat down and discussed the product and where he believed this business could go. I was hooked at once and could see the scale of opportunity and how my skill-set could help to support this growth."

Flanagan is co-founder and chief commercial officer of PLATFORM Golf. He says that off-course golf is exploding in demand. "The total addressable market in the off-course golf industry currently sits at around $9 billion and the market is growing at 20 per cent per annum," Flanagan said. "So, incredibly, for quite a condensed industry, this part of the space is a green field of opportunity which we are approaching very strategically."

PLATFORM Golf already has customers built up over the last decade. It has installed products in homes and supplied more than 40 elite National Collegiate Athletic Association College programmes as well as golf clubs and teaching facilities in the United States, and elsewhere.

"Our plans now are truly global and we have the product, the team and the vision to achieve this."

Best in class product developed

Rory Flanagan's enthusiasm is contagious. I ask him what makes PLATFORM Golf special versus its competitors in the off-course golf industry.

"I like to simply say the three Ps - the people, the product and the practice. The team we have assembled is a who's who of talented professionals from both inside and outside the golfing world," he said.

"This is probably what I am most proud of. The people we are also partnering with are some of the most important in golf, across both our investor network and our ambassadors.

"Along with the team, the product is also best-in-class thanks to the high-quality aluminium components we use, coupled with the fact that our technology is globally patented. The ability to qualify score, time and time again, on a reliable and repeatable surface is what sets us apart from all others. This hasn't been achievable with our competitors and we are primed and ready to capitalise on our unique market offering."

Flanagan said PLATFORM Golf had built and was building relationships with not just the best golf players but also the gurus and experts who train both professionals and amateurs.

A network in the industry

Most of its sales were word-of-mouth until now but it has assembled a team with a big network in the golf industry. "Golf is global but, at its core, it really is a small village and if you don't handle your business professionally, you can quickly be found out and pushed aside," he said.

"The first platform we installed was 10 years ago at David Orr's Flatstick Academy. That platform has never broken down and still has the same turf and actuators on it. We build products that last and so margin/scale wasn't necessarily at the fore when we initially started building these products, but customer experience was and we have continued to have an evangelical level of support across our client base."

"We are working with a host of the world's most revered coaches not only in putting but also in full swing coaching. Brad Faxon, Stephen Sweeney, Shane Lowry's putting coach, Claude Harmon and many others have come on board as ambassadors and it really validates what and how we are doing things."

Rory Flanagan credits his business partner and co-founder Thomas Hackett as the "real visionary" behind turning PLATFORM Golf into a global business.

"Thomas took the wheel a number of years ago and has really put all the pieces together," he said. "What I have found great about working so closely with Thomas is that our skill sets are very different but yet we tend to reach the same conclusion when making big decisions. Like all partnerships, we disagree at times but our partnership is one founded on absolute trust and belief in one another.

"As we have been working on this project for many years, it is great to be in such a lock-step with a co-founder and it's always comforting to know that someone has your back," Flanagan said.

"I could literally list everyone on the team as a star performer but to name a few, our COO Tim Cote was one of the founders of Tru-Spec and Tim has designed some of the most celebrated teaching and fitting studios in the world. Will Thompson has also joined our team as our VP of global operations. Like Tim, Will has designed and installed some of the top facilities globally and both bring a wealth of industry experience to the team. Our head of global sales, another Irishman, Gary McDermott, previously worked on the professional tours with Trackman and is also extremely switched on commercially and business-wise, having previously worked in the banking sector in Ireland."

Hitting all the targets

PLATFORM Golf has worked with over 250 customers to date. It now plans to step up production and Flanagan said it was ready to grow.

"As we move to a more modular product design it allows us to be more agile as a business, certainly when it comes to international expansion. With that said, we are currently working on our complete partnership integration," he said. "Once finished in the coming weeks, and when we have the full joined-up system ready for sale, we are looking to produce in excess of 2,000 platforms in 2025 and the growth is very much hockey stick thereafter.

"Currently, there are around 500,000 upsell opportunities for our platform through our partnership networks and this industry is growing at a rate of 20 per cent per annum. So we are very excited about the myriad of opportunities and are working hard to ensure the supply will match the demand."

Given the scale of the opportunity, was PLATFORM Golf tempted to raise more than $5 million?

"We agreed on the current number to allow us that cushion to go and achieve what we wanted without the need to go back to the investment well," Flanagan said. "Our investors are fully aware and not one bit blinkered by our goals and so far we are hitting every target we set out to achieve. This is an industry that iterates and pivots fast and the tech is always improving so we will always need to keep pushing. Any future investment or raise would be for a very defined reason or perhaps a Series A but we are very happy where we are right now investment-wise."

Conor Sharpe was first introduced to Rory Flanagan in 2020 by Mark Flood, the co-founder of private equity firm Renatus. The two men hit it off as they had both previously lived with their young families in Parsons Green in London. Sharpe was working as chief investment officer with Swoop at the time while Flanagan was with Hambric Sports, a well-known manager of professional golfers since 1977. 

"With the advent of Covid, we had both left London to settle in Dublin and as we stayed in contact, discovered a shared interest to embark on entrepreneurial journeys, pitching each other the merits of our early visions for PLATFORM Golf and CircleRock Capital," Sharpe recalled.

Sharpe, a former captain of the Irish Schools Rugby team and his co-founder Barry O'Neill, a Gaelic footballer, were passionate about sport as well as investing in start-ups, but they hadn't seen the right opportunity. They were tracking Flanagan's progress however and could see how quickly it was progressing.

"We were confident it had reached a stage of being investable," Sharpe said. "PLATFORM Golf has developed a patented product and a mass-market platform that addresses the two biggest challenges with simulators today: delivering an authentic putting and hitting experience, even from uneven lies and slopes," Sharpe said. "Distribution plays a critical role in the opportunities we pursue, and it was evident that Rory, Thomas, and the team have built exceptional golf networks, leveraging their deep expertise in the industry."

CircleRock acts as an outsourced venture for family offices and high-net worth individuals from which it raised some of the capital invested in PLATFORM Golf.

Transforming the game of golf

Rory Flanagan said PLATFORM Golf had recently returned from a trip to the Middle East where demand for its product is helped because it allows people to practice indoors away from the sun. He said the US remained the "biggest play" but it was targeting the world. "The road map is international and we have manufacturing capabilities in Ireland, US and Asia which really ensures a pan-global reach."

"Our mission is to transform the game of golf. How we will achieve this is creating singularity in off course golf and, in essence, bringing the outside game indoors. The indoor game of golf has not been fully completed yet. Playing in a sim has become hyper-realistic but the putting element still lags behind."

"Our aim is to close that loop with our product line and create what we have termed singularity. With that said, we are also working on an outdoor product line that will be waterproof and compliment driving ranges and outdoor practice areas, but that is a phased approach and it's one bite of the elephant at a time."