Open gym was a daily highlight for Birju Kadakia. He grew up in the Chicago suburbs, where a place like Simkus Recreation Center was not a minor municipal amenity. It was where the day became interesting. Years later, after helping Uber expand, working on UberEats internationally and leading product at The Athletic, Kadakia found himself circling back to that old gym. The route was indirect. The product logic was not.
At Uber, the screen led to a car. At UberEats, it led to dinner. At The Athletic, it opened a door into a team and its season. Rec Technologies, the company Kadakia started with Rachel Williams in 2022, asks a similarly plain question of public life: why should it be difficult to discover a class, reserve a court or put a child in swim lessons?
This is software built to make itself disappear. The successful session ends with a resident at a field, a pool, a pottery table or an open gym. It is an enterprise company with a consumer heartbeat, and a civic customer whose work does not fit neatly into the habits of Silicon Valley.
“We envision a world where access to local recreation, playing sports and being active in your community is excruciatingly simple.”Birju Kadakia
The activity guide was the original feed
Kadakia and Williams both relied on public recreation growing up rather than private clubs and expensive coaching. They knew the particular anticipation of a printed activity guide arriving in the mail. It was a feed refreshed every few months, full of possible selves: tennis player, swimmer, painter, camp kid. It was also attached to forms, phone calls, lines and office hours.
Their careers took them to companies that trained consumers to expect immediacy. Kadakia's own shorthand is funny because it is accurate: San Francisco can support several giant technology companies willing to deliver a burrito in 15 minutes, while a parent trying to secure a swim lesson may need luck, patience and an early alarm. That mismatch is the business case. The affection for the activity guide is the reason to care.
Kadakia studied general engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then began in management consulting. He joined Uber in 2013, when the company still required operators who could make a global idea work city by city. His roles moved through Central U.S. operations, the founding team of Xchange Leasing, strategic projects in UberEverything and product leadership for UberEats International. The common thread was not transportation. It was the messy work between a polished interface and a functioning local operation.
At The Athletic, he moved into a different kind of local identity. Sports fandom is global in aggregate and intimate in practice. A reader cares about one team, one beat writer, one set of rituals. The company was acquired by The New York Times in 2022. By then, Kadakia was already equipped with a useful sequence: consulting taught him organizations, Uber taught him cities and The Athletic taught him community.
A city is not a checkout flow
Rec began with four sides of the same public square. Residents needed to discover and book. Coaches needed to offer lessons. Recreation staff needed tools for facilities, payments, workforce and communication. City leaders needed to understand what was full, what sat unused and where demand was going unmet. Most software treated one slice. Kadakia and Williams wanted the system.
That ambition sounds clean until someone cancels a picnic reservation. A refund can depend on the program, the date, the stated policy, the department's past practice and a human reading of the circumstances. A rainout creates a chain of messages, waitlists, credits and follow-ups. Recreation software sits where database logic meets the judgment of the person behind the counter.
When Rec emerged from stealth in March 2024, it had raised $6.2 million and had ten employees. A year and a half later, the company announced an $11 million Series A led by Crosslink Capital. By the end of 2025, it said its systems were powering recreation for millions of residents across more than 20 states. The numbers describe scale. The municipal launches show what scale demands.
At Apex Park and Recreation District in Colorado, an end-to-end launch moved gym memberships, summer-camp registration and ice-rink rentals onto Rec. Kadakia said 50,000 residents had profiles, more than 500 staff relied on the system and tens of millions of dollars moved through it. Behind the visible pages sat access controls, accounting and customer communication. Rec had replaced a software incumbent built over 25 years.
A clean resident interface is only the front door. The system still has to survive the rainy-day cancellation, reconcile the payment and help the next person off the waitlist.
The interesting part of Kadakia's reaction was where he pointed next. The completed operating system was the foundation for software that would let staff spend less time behind screens. This is Rec's recurring inversion: the company keeps adding technology in order to ask less attention from the people using it.
AI after the basics
Kadakia is careful about the order of operations. Rec spent its first years fixing mobile registration, reservations and the ordinary machinery of a recreation department. Only then did it begin describing AI agents that could work across those systems. His public argument is not that a language model can make a clever program description. It is that software can understand the chain between a cancellation, a refund rule, a resident message and an open place on a waitlist.
In early 2026, Rec surveyed 92 members of Arlington Parks, Recreation and Culture. Half were already using AI at least occasionally. Their average comfort was 2.84 out of five. Accuracy and trust drew 56 mentions as concerns; replacing human judgment drew 49. The gap between exposure and confidence became more important than adoption alone.
The trust gap
Mentions among 92 Arlington recreation staff surveyed for Rec's 2026 AI master plan.
Bar length shows mentions as a share of all 92 respondents. Respondents could express more than one concern.
Kadakia's proposed answer is deliberately operational: map the workflows, organize the data, train staff and preserve escalation to a person when the software encounters ambiguity. It is less cinematic than a general-purpose robot. It is also easier to picture in a real office on the morning after a storm.
“The constraint in recreation has never been motivation. It's time.”Birju Kadakia
The staff in Arlington said that hours returned to them could go toward programming, community presence, planning and development. That makes time the product's scarce resource. A useful AI feature is one that gives some back without taking judgment along with it.
A cap table with first memories
Rec's Series A brought a conspicuous group of athletes and athlete-connected funds into the company: Larry Fitzgerald Jr., Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures, Andre Agassi, Kelvin Beachum Jr., Joe Montana's Liquid 2 Ventures and Marquee Ventures. The celebrity version of this story is obvious. The deeper version runs through the same public courts and fields Kadakia remembers.
Many professional careers begin with an affordable first chance: a neighborhood team, a municipal court, a coach willing to show up. Kadakia has said the athletes who are useful as investors bring perspective from performing under scrutiny, open doors and lean in when needed. Fitzgerald has appeared with Rec at a technology summit for Arizona recreation leaders. The relationship makes more sense as operating partnership than endorsement.
It also says something about Kadakia's style. Recommendations from his earlier consulting years describe an adaptive, hard-working communicator who could lead with little direction and build relationships across levels. His later public writing keeps returning to co-builders: Williams, city staff, recreation directors, product teams, investors. The founder is visible, but the work is narrated as a group project.
The city comes into view
In July 2026, Kadakia announced a Rec partnership with Indianapolis. The dimensions are civic: 218 parks, 155 sports fields, 23 indoor recreation facilities and 20 aquatic centers, with more than 800,000 residents eventually able to use the system. It is also a return toward the Midwest, where his own idea of a good day was formed inside a park district.
The scale changes, but the unit of value remains stubbornly small. A parent gets the swim lesson. A coach fills a court. A staff member avoids an afternoon of callbacks. A child finds an open gym and wants to come back tomorrow.
Kadakia once wrote that he and Williams wanted to build something lasting with big impact, but also wanted to have the time of their lives doing it. That second clause keeps the company honest. Recreation should contain pleasure. The people making its software should remember why anyone is registering in the first place.
The activity guide is becoming a platform, the front desk is becoming an operating system and some of the paperwork is becoming an agent. Yet Rec's promise is not a more elaborate digital world. It is the ordinary miracle on the other side of the transaction: people finding one another in public, with something to do.