⭐Upside VC Profile: Centre Court Capital & Chat with Mustafa Ghouse, GP

VC name: Centre Court Capital

Headquartered: Mumbai, India

Founded: 2023

Team: Mustafa Ghouse (Founding General Partner), Alok Samtaney, Faraz Abdi

Website: centrecourtcapital.com

Sectors: Sports Technology, Fitness & Wellness, Gaming & Interactive Media. The firm specifically highlights areas including analytics/data platforms, broadcast technology, fan engagement, league/franchise operations and sports infrastructure.

VC type: Sector-focused early-stage venture capital fund; SEBI-registered Category II AIF.

Typical investment range: $500K to $2.5M–$3M, with capital reserved for follow-on investments.

Stage of first check: Seed / Series A.

Geographic focus: Primarily India, while also investing selectively in international companies.

Total number of investments: 11 investments at the time of the interview, with a target of approximately 17–18 investments for Fund I.

Investment philosophy: Focus on companies solving meaningful problems today that can stand the test of time, scale significantly and potentially expand internationally.

Key investment criteria: Founding team + size/scalability of the problem being solved. Understanding the founders’ read on the market, ability to navigate difficult situations and capacity to build something that can scale substantially.

Areas of particular interest: Broadcast technology, data analytics, player development and coaching, spatial AI/immersive sports viewing, sports infrastructure and sports retail.

Below is the list of Centre Court Capital’ portfolio companies:

Source: Centre Court Capital

Centre Court Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm focused primarily on sports, sports technology, health and wellness, esports and gaming, with a strong emphasis on opportunities emerging from India. Founded by former professional tennis player and sports executive Mustafa Ghouse, the firm typically invests from Seed through Series A, writing initial checks ranging from approximately $500,000 to $2.5–$3 million, with capital reserved for follow-on investments.

Centre Court looks for strong founding teams solving meaningful, scalable problems, with particular interest in areas such as broadcast technology, data analytics, player development and coaching, spatial AI and immersive sports experiences, sports infrastructure and retail. While India represents the core of its investment thesis, the firm also backs select international companies and looks for businesses with the potential to scale globally.

This week, we interviewed Mustafa Ghouse, Founding General Partner at Centre Court Capital. A former professional tennis player who represented India in the Davis Cup and competed on the ATP Tour, Mustafa later moved into sports management, high-performance sports and team ownership before launching Centre Court Capital.

We discussed his background, the evolution of the sports investment landscape in India, Centre Court Capital’s investment thesis, the areas of sports tech that excite him most, and what he looks for when evaluating early-stage startups. Mustafa also shared his perspective on the importance of founding teams, solving scalable problems, taking a bottom-up approach to understanding the sports industry, and his advice for anyone looking to build a career in sports tech investment.

You can watch the video interview below by clicking on the Youtube link. You can also listen to the audio interview by clicking on the link at the top of the page:

Here are some of the best quotes of our conversation with Mustafa:

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1. Can you tell me about your background?

“I spent a large part of my life as a professional tennis player... I played on the Indian Davis Cup team and on the ATP Tour for many years. I was amongst the top singles and doubles players out of India throughout my career.”

His transition from athlete to sports business:

“Post-tennis, sports management and the business side of sport seemed to be the obvious direction — staying in the industry that I understood, but trying to look at it from a different lens.”

One of the strongest parts of his background is what he subsequently built at JSW:

“I conceptualized and built India’s first multi-sport high-performance Olympic training center... We had our first group of athletes qualify for the Rio Olympics. One of them won a medal for the country. At the Tokyo Olympics, we had two medals from our program, and one of those was India’s first gold medal in track and field in 100 years of Olympic participation.”

He also moved into team ownership, initially through soccer and the Pro Kabaddi League before investing in an IPL franchise in 2018.

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2. Can you tell me about your VC?

“I started realizing that there’s a huge gap in the early-stage venture space when it came to investing across sport, sports tech, fitness [and] the whole health industry.”

He believes timing has been important:

“You had to see enough depth in the market, you had to see a large enough market opportunity. All those pieces were coming together. There was a lot of tailwind... [We] felt that it was a good time to launch Center Court Capital.”

Center Court was launched in 2023 and had made 11 investments at the time of the interview, with plans for approximately 17–18 investments from its first fund. Its thesis spans seed through Series A across sports, sports tech, health and wellness, alongside esports and gaming.

A useful quote on check size:

“The range would be starting as early as $500K, going up to $2.5–$3 million, with sufficient capital to do follow-on checks.”

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3. What is your sports-tech investment philosophy?

“Are we looking at opportunities that are problem-solving in the now? Are we looking at opportunities that will stand the test of time?”

Ghouse emphasized that Center Court looks at opportunities primarily through an India-focused lens, while still considering their ability to expand internationally:

“We evaluate these opportunities both from a business-growth perspective, because that’s very relevant for us in India at this point in time, and the ability to eventually scale and go international.”

Another important element is avoiding technologies limited to a single sport:

“We’ve tried to at least look at investment opportunities that can be multi-sport in nature. They don’t have to be specific to just cricket or just football.”

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4. What are your favorite investments?

“Today I’m going to say all — hopefully all our portfolio companies will watch this. All are my favorites.”

“We’re very young in our journey of investing... We’ve had maybe two or three that have already progressed to raising follow-on capital or moved into the next phase of their journey, whereas a bulk of them are still [companies] that we’ve invested in the last six to eight months.”

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5. Which areas of sports tech excite you the most?

Rather than naming one category, Ghouse described a deliberately broad investment approach:

“We’ve invested in the space around broadcast technology. We’ve done something in data analytics and player development and coaching. We’ve got an investment in spatial AI for viewership of sport and the immersive experience to consume sport while you’re at home.”

Center Court’s interests also extend beyond pure technology:

“We’ve got an investment in a sports infrastructure company. We recently invested in a multi-brand retail business and platform. So it’s pretty diverse in terms of what we’re looking at and how we look to deploy capital.”

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6. What do you look for when deciding whether to invest in a startup?

“The founding team is the first thing that you look at, especially when you’re talking about very early-stage investing.”

“What is their read on the market? What is the pulse of understanding where things are headed? How would they navigate through certain situations when things got rough? Those are characteristics and traits that you tend to try to determine right up front.”

And then comes his clearest summary of Center Court’s investment criteria:

“They should be problem-solving for something that is large and can be scaled up in a big way... For us, the team and the opportunity that they’re looking to solve for are probably the first two things that we would identify.”

So his hierarchy appears to be founding team → meaningful problem → large/scalable opportunity, rather than simply investing because a startup has interesting technology.

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7. What advice would you give someone looking to start a career in sports-tech investment?

Ghouse starts with the broader opportunity:

“The market is growing. The industry is growing globally. It continues to be an asset class that everyone wants a piece of. It’s an asset class that is continuously showing resilience to various macro headwinds.”

But his most interesting advice is to understand sports from the bottom up rather than simply looking at macro trends:

“Having a sense of the industry, having a bottom-up approach is important. I see a lot of times where investors that are not clued in try to take decisions based on a 20,000-foot view or a 30,000-foot view, and that’s not always relevant from a timing perspective.”

And he explains why timing matters in venture:

“It may make sense at a macro level, but it may not be relevant today or for the next four or five years. Eventually, for us, we are investing for the next five, seven years. That’s what VC is all about.”

Finally:

“People think that it’s pretty niche, but it’s not, because there are so many aspects to the industry. So having a good understanding across the board is also very important.”

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