Push Sports: How a ₹1 Lakh Cricket Academy Became "India's New Playground"

Every so often a startup comes along that isn't trying to sell you something new so much as repair something old and broken. In India, sport has long been treated as a distraction from "real" life, something children outgrow on their way to exam halls and engineering colleges. Push Sports was built to argue the opposite: that play is not the enemy of education but a missing part of it. In less than a decade, the company has gone from a single cricket academy run on borrowed optimism to a multi-sport venture backed by two of the country's best-known investors. This is the story of how that happened.

From the cabin to the crease

Push Sports begins, fittingly, with someone walking away from a comfortable job. Former cricketer Puru Singh left a glamorous role as cabin crew to chase a far less certain future in India's notoriously thin sports economy. He had reason to be cautious: coaching at academies, he discovered, paid roughly ₹25,000 a month, and the broader industry offered painfully few doors to knock on for someone who loved the game and wanted to build a career around it.

So in 2016 he built his own door. With a modest investment of about ₹1 lakh, Singh launched what was then called Push Cricket, a single cricket academy and, more importantly, a bet that demand for serious, structured coaching existed if someone bothered to supply it.

The team came together over the next several years rather than all at once. Nitin Pahuja first met Puru at a cricket match and came in as an investor before transitioning to the business full-time around 2020; he then brought in Mukul Grover as the third co-founder. Together they took on distinct roles, with Puru leading the coaching side, Nitin running finance and investor relations, and Mukul driving the infrastructure and franchise business.

The pivot: from one sport to ten

The turning point came around 2022, when Push Cricket became Push Sports. The shift wasn't just cosmetic. The team recognised that the gap they'd spotted in cricket, a lack of guidance, infrastructure, and structured pathways for young athletes, ran across every sport in the country. So they widened the lens dramatically, evolving from a single-discipline academy into an end-to-end, multi-sport management company.

The branding that emerged captured the ambition neatly: "India's New Playground." It's a phrase designed to sound less like a tagline and more like a declaration: an expression of a confident, competitive India ready to take play seriously.

Today the company organises its world around a few core ideas:

• Structured sports education delivered by trained coaches across roughly ten sports, for children aged 3 to 19.
• Transforming spaces into arenas: converting school grounds and underused land into safe, professional-grade play areas.
• Gamified assessments: tools designed to keep kids physically active while building both technical skill and softer, interpersonal abilities, all aimed at holistic development rather than narrow athletic output.

A three-sided business model

Part of what makes Push Sports interesting is that it isn't a single business wearing one hat. It operates across several revenue streams that reinforce one another:

1. School partnerships. Push Sports embeds structured sports programmes inside educational institutions, turning academic campuses into sports hubs and weaving physical activity into the school day rather than bolting it on after hours.
2. Owned and franchised arenas. The company develops and runs multi-sport arenas and training facilities, and offers a franchise model so entrepreneurs and sports enthusiasts can open their own Push-branded centres with the backing of an established system.
3. Pay-and-play. For casual users (adults and kids who simply want to book a turf or a session), the company runs a flexible, pay-as-you-go model that keeps its arenas busy outside of structured class hours.

By the company's own accounts, that mix had grown to serve 6,000–7,000+ children and roughly 3,000+ active pay-and-play customers across 20+ locations, with more than 2 lakh square feet of space transformed into play arenas across 65+ projects, supported by a team the company puts at well over 100 (including coaches and field staff), and a network of 80+ coaches.

The Shark Tank moment

Push Sports entered the national spotlight in early 2024 on Shark Tank India Season 3. The founders pitched against a backdrop of rising obesity, diabetes, and mental-health issues among schoolchildren, pairing a coach network and a multi-sport curriculum with gamified assessments meant to make staying active feel like play.

The sharks split. Some questioned whether a company spanning schools, arenas, franchising, and pay-and-play was focused enough, but two ultimately made separate offers, and the founders convinced them to combine. The result: ₹80 lakh for 4% equity plus a 2% royalty until ₹1.6 crore was recouped, at a ₹20 crore valuation, from Vineeta Singh (SUGAR Cosmetics) and Peyush Bansal (Lenskart).

Beyond the cheque, it brought two proven consumer-brand operators on board. The company has since been cited at a higher valuation of roughly ₹38 to ₹40 crore, according to its own LinkedIn page and startup-data trackers such as Tracxn.

Backers beyond the tank

The sharks are the famous names, but they're not the whole cap table. Push Sports has also drawn support from investors including Beyond Seed, Ah!Ventures, and Baazi Games / PokerBaazi, with reported total funding in the region of a few hundred thousand dollars across early rounds.

After the Shark Tank appearance, the founders signalled they were already raising a larger seed round, earmarked for building out the team and expanding into new cities.

The hard parts

It would be easy to tell this as a clean upward line, but the friction is the most instructive bit. Push Sports has had to fight three battles at once: an industry that historically paid poorly and offered little, parents who needed convincing that sport was a legitimate investment in their child rather than a distraction from studies, and the operational sprawl of running a business that spans coaching, real estate, franchising, and technology simultaneously.

That breadth is both the company's biggest asset and the thing its sharpest critics flagged as a risk: focus is harder when you're trying to be a playground for everyone.

Why it matters

India's sports-tech market is on a steep climb, and grassroots infrastructure is the least glamorous, most under-served corner of it. Push Sports is making a deliberate bet on that corner: not the next fantasy-gaming app or streaming deal, but the unsexy, foundational work of getting more children playing more sport, more often, in more places, and building a culture in which that's normal.

Whether the company can turn its sprawling, multi-sided model into a focused, durable business is the open question. But the underlying conviction is hard to argue with. If India genuinely wants to become a sporting nation rather than a nation that occasionally celebrates sport, someone has to build the playground first. Push Sports decided it might as well be them.