UK golf technology startup Paralo has raised £270,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to develop its operating system for golf clubs and a connected product for golfers. £250,000 of the founder-led angel round was raised under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme SEIS), which offers great tax-efficient benefits to investors in return for investment in small and early-stage startup businesses in the UK.
Founded in 2026 by Jarrad Hicks and Zaheer Merali, Paralo is developing 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.
Golf’s technology market has historically offered clubs limited choice. Legacy systems remain deeply embedded and data is fragmented across vendors. In some markets, access to core infrastructure is controlled by governing bodies. In England, for example, technology providers require approval from England Golf to connect to World Handicap System infrastructure.
Golf clubs can currently rely on more than 20 separate software products to manage their operations, while golfers often need several different applications to play a single round.
Paralo is building a common operating layer for clubs alongside a connected golfer product designed to work across clubs, competitions, societies and golf trips.
Rather than selling a fixed software package, the founders have spent months working inside golf clubs, shadowing staff and mapping their operations before developing the platform.
According to Jarrad Hicks, co-founder of Paralo:
“Golf is an incredibly sophisticated sport sitting on surprisingly fragmented technology. I couldn’t understand why I needed three apps to play one round, and once we started spending time inside clubs it became clear that the problem went much deeper.
We don’t think golf needs another app. We’re building the infrastructure underneath the club and the product above it.”
Paralo believes the next generation of golf technology will be built around greater interoperability and club choice, with open technical standards allowing clubs to choose the products that best serve their members.
Paralo’s architecture allows individual clubs to retain their own operating rules, identity and member experience rather than standardising clubs around a single way of working.
The intention is for technology to make a golf club “more itself”.
The company is currently deploying the platform with one of the UK’s leading private golf clubs, which is working with Paralo as an early design partner. However, it's still waiting for access in England despite support from some of the country’s leading clubs. According to Hicks:
“We want to earn our place on the quality of the technology we build. Ultimately, clubs should be able to choose the products that best serve their members.”
Merali added:
“The complexity should sit underneath the product, not with the golfer or the club team. That’s the engineering problem we’re interested in solving.”
Hicks previously worked in healthtech, selling technology to complex hospital environments, while Merali is a senior systems engineer with experience at Cisco and Webex.
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
The company was valued at £3 million pre-money.
Lead image: Paralo CTO, Zaheer Merali (left) and CEO, Jarrad Hicks (right).
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