Compagnie des Alpes (CDA) has acquired an initial 33.9 percent of PadelCity, paying €20 million for the stake and pushing the German padel operator’s post-money equity value past €65 million. This is PadelCity’s first Series A round.
€12 million of the total paid has come through a capital increase reserved to CDA, priced against a reference enterprise value of €55 million for the company. The remaining €8 million has gone towards the buy-out of existing shareholders, at a 15 percent discount to the same figure. In addition, CDA now holds two call options: one to raise its stake to roughly 75 percent in early 2028, the other to take full ownership by the end of 2030.
Founded in Munich in 2022, PadelCity is by CDA’s estimate one of Germany’s leading operators of padel clubs. CEO Jonathan Sierck co-founded the company with Sebastian Weil and Markus Englert. Equity holders include former Bayern Munich and Germany head coach Hansi Flick, now in charge at FC Barcelona, along with international footballers Mats Hummels and Joshua Kimmich. According to Munich Startup, investors had already put more than €15 million into the company before this round.
The company runs 24 clubs in Germany today, up from 17 at the end of 2025, and hopes to have 40 clubs and 350 courts by the close of the year. It is also pushing into Poland and Austria and aspiring to an annualized revenue run rate of about €50 million by the end of 2026, at a normalized margin of 42 percent.
In 2024 CDA acquired Urban Group, France’s leader in five-a-side football and a co-leader in padel. That deal, announced in March 2024, valued Urban Group at €157 million in enterprise terms, with CDA agreeing to pay €129.7 million for an 86.5 percent stake and a possible €10 million earn-out, tied to the tax treatment of the business. CDA closed on 83.0 percent of that stake in June 2024 and secured the remaining 3.5 percent, held by a holding vehicle for some of Urban Group’s managers, through separate sale options exercisable later in the year.
PadelCity and Urban Group will be operating independently for now, but CDA says the pairing makes it Europe’s leader in five-a-side football and in padel – meaning, it seems, that they will form Europe’s largest single operator of venues for these sports.
Spain’s Padel Nuestro sells far more gear, and platforms like Playtomic list far more courts than CDA owns, but neither runs clubs. Spain and Italy constitute Europe’s largest padel markets by a wide margin, yet neither has produced a chain to rival CDA’s scale. Spain’s biggest operator to specialize in padel, Padelprix, runs just 63 courts and is confined to Galicia, and most of the country’s 17,000 courts sit in independent, single-site clubs.
The one operator of comparable multi-country scale, Sweden’s PDL United, has ambitions of its own to be Europe’s leader, but its size is difficult to gauge. PDL is privately held, trades under several absorbed brand names, and – unlike CDA, which is listed on Euronext and discloses deal terms – is under no obligation to publish a consolidated count of its courts.
Germany, though, remains a big country with a relatively small padel market: about 1,400 courts nationwide at the end of 2025 (roughly one for every 60,000 residents, against one per 15,000 in France). This is a fraction of Italy’s 10,220 courts or Spain’s roughly 17,000. PadelCity alone already accounts for close to 10 percent of Germany’s courts. This is more than any operator claims in Spain, or likely in Italy, but it is a big fish in a middling pond.
PadelCity and Urban Group together will soon be operating in France, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland and Austria. By the end of 2026 Urban Group alone is set to run 43 clubs (sites in Portugal and Luxembourg included) with 295 five-a-side pitches and 155 padel courts. In combination the two businesses are projected to generate close to €150 million in revenue and nearly €65 million in IFRS EBITDA by 2029.
