Founded by a sports person. For sports people.
Athlio was founded by Vijay Kumar Reddy, a former national-level badminton player who trained under three of India's most respected coaches, played competitively for 13 years, and then spent a decade running sports programs for India's top gated communities. This page is his story — and why Athlio exists.
Vijay Kumar Reddy started playing badminton in 1999 and didn't stop until 2012. Thirteen years as a competitive player — the kind of thirteen years that isn't a hobby. The kind that shapes how you see everything about sports afterward.
He trained under Goverdhan Reddy from the beginning — the coach who built his foundation. Then four years under S.M. Arif, a Dronacharya awardee and one of the most respected coaches in Indian badminton history. And then — for a decisive year and a half — under Pullela Gopichand, All England Open champion, Dronacharya awardee, Padma Bhushan recipient, and the coach who has since built India's two Olympic medals in badminton through Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu.
That lineage matters. Not because of the names — names are names — but because spending thirteen years inside India's best badminton infrastructure teaches you what makes sports work, what makes academies run, and what makes the whole system fail when it fails. That knowledge doesn't go away when you stop competing. It shows up in every decision you make afterward.
In 2016, Athlio signed its first partnership — with Aparna Constructions, one of Hyderabad's most reputed real estate developers. The job was simple: outsource badminton and tennis coaches to their residential communities. Nobody else was doing it professionally. Residents wanted sports. Builders couldn't figure out how to staff it. Vijay Kumar Reddy had spent thirteen years around sports and knew coaches the way most founders know product-market fit.
Ten years later, Athlio is in 14 communities across Hyderabad, runs 85+ coaches, and has become the registered sports vendor for five of India's largest facility management firms — JLL, CBRE, Kapston, Go Integra, and BVG. In 2020, Athlio acquired a 2.5-acre sports academy in Hyderabad — ten badminton courts, half-Olympic swimming pool, gym, hostel — and started running the kind of facility where students from across India come to train, and international coaches visit to deliver camps.
And now, in 2026, Athlio is launching the software — because after a decade of running sports, it became obvious that the operational pain we felt was the same pain every academy in India felt. So we built the tool. We're using it first at our own academy, then offering it to every academy in the country that wants to stop chasing fees and start running a business.
You become the people who teach you.
Vijay Kumar Reddy didn't pick up badminton casually. Over thirteen years of competitive playing, he trained under three of the most respected coaches in Indian badminton. Every one of them left something on how he runs Athlio today.
Two and a half acres. Where Athlio gets tested first.
In 2020, Athlio acquired a sports academy in Hyderabad — ten badminton courts, a half-Olympic swimming pool, a gym, and a hostel. It's not a showroom. It's a working facility where students train, coaches coach, and Athlio's software gets used every day.
Students come from across India. International coaches visit for training camps. And every feature we ship in Athlio's software has to work here first — because if it doesn't work in our own academy, we don't ship it.
Two moments turned Athlio from an idea into a company.
Every company has a founding story. Athlio has two — because the service side and the software side started at different moments, for different reasons, and came together into one business.
The moment we became a sports company.
Aparna Constructions, one of Hyderabad's most reputed developers, needed badminton and tennis coaches for their communities. Nobody in the market was doing this professionally — just freelancers, word-of-mouth, and a lot of coaching programs that stopped running within six months.
Vijay Kumar Reddy saw what his thirteen years on court had trained him to see: a sports operation needed a real operator. So Athlio started — with one contract, two sports, and one decision to treat sports staffing with the seriousness it deserved.
The moment we became a software company.
When Athlio acquired its own 2.5-acre sports academy, one thing became impossible to ignore: an entire manager's full-time job was collecting fees. Calling parents. Noting payments in a register. Calling again. Every month, for every parent, forever.
The same pain existed in the 14 communities Athlio was already running. The same pain existed in every sports academy in India. That was the moment Athlio decided to build the software — because the operational scar was universal, and someone who'd lived it should be the one to fix it.
Five things that shape how Athlio runs, every day.
Sports is a real industry, not a side hobby.
We treat sports infrastructure with the seriousness most companies reserve for finance or manufacturing. Every operational decision — who we hire, how we contract, what we guarantee — assumes that parents, residents, and academy owners deserve the same quality bar they expect from any serious vendor.
You can't build sports software without playing sports.
Every feature in Athlio was felt first, coded later. We built the fee collection because we were chasing fees ourselves. We built the attendance system because we'd watched paper registers fail. We didn't guess at workflows — we lived them, then encoded them.
Coaching is a profession. Coaches deserve to be treated like professionals.
Coaches shouldn't chase salaries, explain their absences to three different people, or work without a bench to cover them. We pay on time, we replace on time, and we treat our 85+ coaches like the professionals they are. This is also why our communities never see a day of coaching interrupted.
If it doesn't work at our own academy, it doesn't ship.
Athlio's 2.5-acre sports academy is not a showroom. It's where every new feature gets tested against real students, real coaches, real parents, and real consequences. If our own manager can't use a feature, neither can anyone else's. Nothing ships until it's been tried.
India deserves a sports platform.
We started in Hyderabad. We're still only in Hyderabad. But the vision has always been bigger than one city — a single platform where anyone in India can find an academy, find a coach, or run one well. The country has a generation of talent waiting for infrastructure to catch up. Athlio is one piece of that infrastructure, being built one community, one academy, one coach at a time.
