Paralo raises £270K to tackle golf’s fragmented technology stack

Paralo, a UK golf technology startup, raised £270,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round to develop an operating system for golf clubs and a connected product for golfers, per Tech.eu. The company was valued at £3 million pre-money.

£250,000 of the founder-led angel round was raised under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), which offers tax-efficient benefits to investors backing small and early-stage UK businesses, according to Tech.eu. The funding will be used to expand product and engineering development, continue deployment with design-partner clubs, and build the infrastructure connecting club operations with the golfer-facing product. Paralo is initially focused on golf clubs in the UK and Ireland.

Founded in 2026 by Jarrad Hicks (CEO) and Zaheer Merali (CTO), Paralo is building software to replace the fragmented systems currently used to run golf clubs — spanning membership, tee sheets, competitions, payments, EPOS, food and beverage, marketing, reporting, and agronomy. Hicks previously worked in healthtech, selling technology into complex hospital environments, while Merali is a senior systems engineer with experience at Cisco and Webex, Tech.eu reports. Rather than building a fixed software package, the founders spent months working inside golf clubs, shadowing staff and mapping operations before developing the platform.

The problem Paralo is addressing is structural. Golf clubs currently rely on more than 20 separate software products to manage operations, and golfers often need several different applications to play a single round, according to Tech.eu. Legacy systems remain deeply embedded, data is fragmented across vendors, and in some markets governing bodies control access to core infrastructure. In England specifically, technology providers require approval from England Golf to connect to World Handicap System infrastructure — a barrier Paralo says it is still navigating despite support from some of the country's leading clubs. "We want to earn our place on the quality of the technology we build," Hicks told Tech.eu. "Ultimately, clubs should be able to choose the products that best serve their members."

Paralo's architecture is designed to let individual clubs retain their own operating rules, identity, and member experience rather than standardising around a single way of working. The company is currently deploying the platform with one unnamed leading UK private golf club acting as an early design partner. Merali described the core engineering ambition to Tech.eu: "The complexity should sit underneath the product, not with the golfer or the club team."