In the photo: Paralo CTO, Zaheer Merali (left) and CEO, Jarrad Hicks (right)
UK technology startup Paralo has raised £270,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round at a £3 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by founder-led angel investors, with £250,000 raised through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), which provides tax incentives for investing in early-stage UK businesses.
Founded in 2026 by Jarrad Hicks and Zaheer Merali, the company plans to use the capital to accelerate product and engineering development, expand deployments with design-partner clubs, and connect its club management infrastructure with its golfer-facing platform. Paralo is initially targeting golf clubs across the UK and Ireland.
Golf clubs currently rely on up to 20 separate software vendors to manage day-to-day operations, including tee sheets, memberships, competitions, payments, food and beverage, EPOS, marketing, reporting, and agronomy. Similarly, golfers often have to use multiple separate applications during a single round.
Legacy systems remain deeply embedded across the sector, and access to core infrastructure can be restricted by governing bodies. In England, for instance, technology providers must obtain approval from England Golf to integrate with the World Handicap System.
Paralo is addressing this fragmentation by developing an operating system for golf clubs alongside a connected product for golfers that functions across different clubs, societies, competitions, and trips.
“Golf is an incredibly sophisticated sport sitting on surprisingly fragmented technology,” said co-founder Jarrad Hicks. “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.”
Before building the platform, the founders spent months inside golf clubs shadowing staff to map operational workflows. Paralo's architecture focuses on interoperability and open technical standards, allowing clubs to keep their existing operational rules, identity, and member experience rather than adapting to a standardized system. The goal is to use technology to make a golf club “more itself.”
“The complexity should sit underneath the product, not with the golfer or the club team,” said co-founder Zaheer Merali. “That’s the engineering problem we’re interested in solving.”
Paralo is currently deploying its platform with a top UK private golf club serving as an early design partner. However, the company is still awaiting operational access in England despite support from prominent local clubs.
“We want to earn our place on the quality of the technology we build,” Hicks said. “Ultimately, clubs should be able to choose the products that best serve their members.”
The founding team brings backgrounds in technology and engineering: Hicks previously worked in healthtech selling software into complex hospital settings, while Merali is a senior systems engineer with prior experience at Cisco and Webex.
Source: tech.eu
