The PlayHQ Story So Far

Like your favourite team or sporting idol, PlayHQ started out small. We’d love to tell you a little bit about our humble beginnings, and how we got to where we are today.

It all started back in 2018, when the core team at PlayHQ were part of Codeware, Australia’s leading sports technology consultancy. We realised that there was a significant gap in the market, where community sports organisations were looking for a better, smarter, simpler way to manage the thousands of games that were taking place across Australia each and every week. 

These same organisations were dealing with burdensome legacy IT systems and mountains of ancient paperwork, spreadsheets and filing cabinets – they wanted to turf it all and replace it with a turnkey SaaS platform, something that would appeal to both players and administrators, something that would deliver a world-class digital experience from Day 1, but with the capacity for constant innovation and scale.

We knew exactly what these organisations were looking for. It just didn’t exist… yet.

So we decided to get our hands dirty. We got down in the trenches with national organisations, sports administrators, weekend volunteers and players from every walk of life. We got to know them and their needs. And out of that consultation period, PlayHQ was born. 

Back then, we were a tight team of just ten people working with our founding partner, Basketball Victoria. In 2019, we launched a successful pilot program, which led to us signing the AFL as our first national client. Our team quickly grew to 30 people, and our seed funding round attracted experienced tech investors and sporting codes from across the country.

From there, PlayHQ has grown exponentially – our team doubled in size (again) in 2020, even as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted community sport nationwide. Shortly after Cricket Australia signed on as our newest national partner, we also completed a Series A funding round of $10 million.

After that, the only way was up. In 2021, our team grew to 100 people – passionate and talented engineers, designers, analysts, strategists, product experts and customer liaisons spread across Australia, India and Ukraine. Netball Australia, as well as Basketball WA, Tasmania and ACT all joined the PlayHQ family. We also launched some incredible new features like our Live Scoring portal. 

And now, in 2022, more than 60% of Australia’s organised sports market has chosen to partner with PlayHQ, unleashing the life-changing power of sport for more than a million players at over 5,500 clubs nationwide. And this is the real magic, we think: every one of those clubs and players get to benefit from each others’ experience. A win for one sporting code means trickle-down innovation for all the others. We think that community sport in Australia has never been more of a community than it is today – and we can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

Because for us, the game’s only just begun.