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The company that watches padel properly.
PADEXA is a UK padel intelligence company. We turn one phone video of your match into the single fix costing you the most points — backed by published research, proven with your own clips, and honest when we can't see.
Help padel players enjoy it more.
In that order.
Built by the player who needed it most.
Two summers ago, in the Spanish sun, someone put a racket in Ross Thornley's hand at a leadership retreat he was running. He couldn't tell you the score of that first hour on court. He can tell you he was grinning the whole time.
Nothing happened for two years. Then, on 11 July 2026, he joined his local club, played his first proper game — and something clicked that hasn't unclicked since. Within a month he was the man playing three matches in one day and colour-coding his calendar around court time.
Then came the wall every improving player hits. No coach at the club. The UK has roughly one accredited padel instructor for every 2,300 players, at £45–120 an hour. One game he'd feel like a natural; the next he'd donate the same silly errors he'd sworn off the day before — with no idea why. His rating told him nothing. His memory, it turns out, was a flattering liar.
Here's the strange part: measuring how people get better at hard things is literally his job. Ten years of it.
Ross spent a decade building the science of measuring human adaptability for serious organisations. Padel had just made him the student again: no feedback, no mirror, no clue. So he went looking — and found two things. First, real science: peer-reviewed match analysis showing where club points actually go. Second, a gap: nothing existed that could watch an ordinary club player's match and tell them the truth about it.
So he built it. PADEXA is built solo, AI-native, and in public — by someone weeks ahead of its newest customer, which we've decided is a feature, not a bug. The founder is the user. The user hits the same walls you do, usually first.
Film. Decode. Improve.
No sensors, no installed cameras, no equipped venues. The whole system runs from one phone propped behind the back glass — which means it works on any padel court in the world.
Film
One phone, landscape, behind the back glass. Two minutes of setup, then leave it alone for the whole match. Tell the other three first — nearly everyone says yes, then asks for the footage.
Decode
Our AI watches every rally of every set — where points were won and lost, which patterns repeat, how your error economy compares to published club-level benchmarks. Whole-match behaviour, not isolated highlights.
Improve
You get the one fix costing you the most points, with up to three clips of you doing it as evidence — plus your PADEXA Index, a 0–100 score of how you played that moves when your behaviour moves.
Four principles we won't trade.
Most sports-tech failure modes are known: confident nonsense, stat dumps, black-box scores. Each principle below is engineered against one of them.
If we couldn't see it, we say so.
Every finding carries a confidence rating. When the footage is ambiguous, the report says "couldn't see it clearly" instead of guessing — because confident-sounding nonsense is how players lose trust in AI analysis. We've spent more engineering time on this than on any other part of the product.
One fix, not twenty stats.
Heatmaps and shot counts describe your match; they don't change your next one. PADEXA prioritises: the single highest-value change, in plain language, with the evidence attached. Everything else waits its turn.
Your clips. Published research. Nothing invented.
Every claim in a PADEXA report traces to your own footage or to our 61-source corpus of peer-reviewed padel research — the same corpus behind our book and every article we publish. No vibes, no made-up numbers.
We're not replacing coaches. We're rationing them better.
With one accredited UK instructor per ~2,300 players, human expertise is the scarcest thing in padel. The AI does the watching; verified coaches add the wisdom through voice-note Coach Notes on your report. Scarce hours go where they matter.
A sports-tech company that shows its working.
PADEXA maintains one of the largest research corpora in amateur padel: 61 published sources and 312 benchmark data points, from unforced-error rates to net-play win percentages. It powers the platform, the match analysis, the book, and the Intelligence Files. The approach has independent backing: a 2026 peer-reviewed study of 180 club players found video-based AI assessment tracked expert-coach judgement more closely than results-based app ratings.
See the 45 numbers every player should know →How the PADEXA Index works — the methodology →
Everything we publish is part of the same evidence engine.
The Little Book of Padel
Everything a new or improving player needs to know — the rules that confuse everyone, the five shots with one job, where club points really go — written from the research corpus, in plain English, with the errors left honest. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
About the book →26 evidence-locked articles. Counting.
Free, fully-cited answers to the questions club players actually search: what level am I, why am I not improving, where do points go, how do ratings really work. Every number traces to a named study. No listicles, no guesswork.
Read the files →Ten honest questions. Two minutes. No score to defend.
Before any camera comes out, the test reads how you actually play — your archetype, your five pillars, and the one leak quietly costing you points. It's free, it's built from the same research corpus, and your written report lands in your inbox.
Small on purpose. Serious on paper.
Know your game.
Film your next match on your phone. We'll tell you the one thing costing you the most points — and prove it with your own clips.
Analyse my match — first match free£12.99/month after. Cancel any time. Harsh judgement welcome.