Making a centuries-old game flashier and easy to play in a group already produced a big business in the golf simulator experience Topgolf, which at its peak sold in a deal valued at about $2 billion.
The British entrepreneurs who created Topgolf are now betting that they can apply that same playbook to pool.
The result is Poolhouse, a two-year-old start-up that two months ago opened a two-story, 21,000-square-foot bar in London, but aims to make its technology available far beyond its own pool halls.
The start-up plans to announce on Friday that it has raised $55 million in a new funding round to finance that growth, led by the investment firm Bluestone Equity Partners. (The financing values the start-up at more than $100 million, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who wasn’t authorized to publicly disclose the information.)
Underlying Poolhouse’s business is a bet that cue sports, which the company says draw hundreds of millions of players worldwide each week, is ripe for an overhaul, just as golf was.
“If we could emulate what Topgolf achieved, then I think we’ll certainly be on the right track to make our own dent in the sport,” Andrew O’Brien, Poolhouse’s chief executive, said in an interview.
Poolhouse’s technology platform, called BillyQ, uses artificial intelligence, tracking cameras and projectors to turn an analog pool game into a kind of arcade experience.
It’s on full display at the company’s London bar, in the heart of the city’s historic financial hub. Amid a Las Vegas-themed sports bar and eatery — with a chef who worked for Gordon Ramsay — is a fleet of pool tables with chunky projectors on top.
Groups can play traditional pool or compete in an array of shootout-type competitions. The BillyQ devices project interactive graphics onto the tables, including blocks to be “broken” by the ball and performance bonuses that players can use.
Among BillyQ’s big selling points, according to Mr. O’Brien, is its ability to assign players handicaps, called Q ratings, to equalize skill settings. (On a recent visit, this reporter’s level of play merited an extremely high one.)
Underpinning BillyQ is technology that Poolhouse developed with the team behind Hawk-Eye, the computer vision system that tracks ball movement in Major League Baseball, ATP Tour tennis and Premier League soccer.
Poolhouse’s roots lie in the same insight that the start-up’s founders, the twins Steve and Dave Jolliffe, had in creating Topgolf and PuttShack, a similar concept built around miniature golf. Traditional games could be married to technology to make them exciting and more accessible, especially by adjusting play for different people’s abilities.
The inspiration for the company came during the pandemic, Steve Jolliffe said in an interview, when the brothers’ local pool hall filed for insolvency. The Jolliffes eventually developed a technology and business model that could make pool halls more inviting to those who aren’t pros.
The brothers then hired Mr. O’Brien, a former Credit Suisse banker who is on the board of F1 Arcade, which runs bars with car racing simulators. He introduced the Jolliffes to the creator of Hawk-Eye and has shown particular interest in refining BillyQ, including by enlisting a statistics professor to make the performance tracking more sophisticated.
“We’re always trying to build a competitive moat around ourselves,” Steve Jolliffe said.
Poolhouse’s efforts eventually drew the attention of Bluestone, whose executives had heard about the start-up and quickly became impressed by its approach. Bluestone agreed to lead the new investment round, which is meant to help finance Poolhouse’s international expansion.
One question is whether Poolhouse can achieve the heights of Topgolf at its apex, while avoiding the issues that brought it back to earth. Callaway Golf, which bought Topgolf in 2021, sold a majority stake in the business this year at about half the original deal’s valuation amid slowing growth and high costs.
(Steve Jolliffe noted that the expense of building Poolhouse bars was far less than that of Topgolf venues, which cost up to $40 million.)
But for all the ritziness of Poolhouse’s pool hall aesthetic, the company’s executives and investors say selling BillyQ devices to other operators is the company’s real future. Mr. O’Brien said executives from one pool hall company had flown to London to try out the technology and mused about upgrading their tables.
Bobby Sharma, the founder and managing partner of Bluestone, said that BillyQ-equipped pool tables could be sold to cruise ships, for example, while Steve Jolliffe said that movie theaters and other hospitality venues could fill empty spaces with a table or two. The company would then collect subscription revenue from those customers.
Poolhouse has been focused on making BillyQ devices smaller and reducing their cost — to about that of a Peloton bike, according to Mr. O’Brien — with an aim to eventually get into people’s homes as well.
He said that the company was close to negotiating a “significant” distribution deal in the United States, and that the goal was to start selling BillyQ there and in Europe next year.
“It’s understandable to think about this as Topgolf for pool, but I think that understates the opportunity,” Mr. Sharma, of Bluestone, said. “Poolhouse is a bigger story in that it’s not just the venue format, it’s the technology.”
