Rec Technologies wants to run your city's parks.

Here is a fact about the software that runs your local Parks & Recreation department: it is, for the most part, terrible. If you have ever tried to register a child for a summer swim class, or reserve a tennis court owned by your city, you have probably encountered a website that looks like it was last updated when frosted tips were in style, timed out somewhere around the payment screen, and left you wondering whether the court was actually booked. This is not anyone's fault, exactly. It is just what happens when the buyer is a municipal recreation department with a small budget and the incumbent software has no particular reason to try harder.

Rec Technologies looked at that and decided it was a business. This is the interesting move. Most startups chase enormous, glamorous markets - the ones where you can wave your hands and say "trillion-dollar opportunity" - and then discover that everyone else had the same idea. Rec went the other direction, toward the least-digitized corner of local government, the office with the clipboards and the fax machine and the software from two decades ago, and said: this is real, people use it every day, and it is broken. That is often where the good vertical software companies hide.

The company was founded in 2022 in San Francisco by Birju Kadakia and Rachel Williams, who did not come from government. They came from Uber and Uber Eats - Kadakia later ran product at The Athletic, Williams did launch work at MasterClass - which is to say they came from the school of thought that logistics problems are just software problems wearing a disguise. Getting a burrito from a restaurant to your door and getting a resident onto a pickleball court are, structurally, not that different: availability, scheduling, payment, and a promise that the thing you booked will actually be there.

What Rec sells is, in its own framing, an operating system for community recreation. On one side is the resident-facing product: a place to discover, book, and pay for courts, gyms, classes, clinics, and private coaching, in your own town, without the ordeal. On the other side is the part city hall cares about - the back office that schedules facilities, manages staff, markets programs, and tracks revenue. The pitch to a recreation director is not "here is a cool app." It is "here is a way to spend less of your week doing administrative triage and more of it actually running programs, while your department makes more money." Those two things - resident convenience and municipal revenue - turn out to be the same lever.

Rec raised roughly $17 million across three rounds. The eye-catching part is the September 2025 Series A: $11 million led by Crosslink Capital, with returning seed investors NFX, Precursor Ventures, and Long Journey Ventures, plus Marquee Ventures, a fund spun out of the Chicago Cubs ownership group. And then there are the athletes.

It is worth pausing on the athlete thing, because it is not just marketing. An NBA MVP (Durant), a Hall of Fame quarterback (Montana), and one of the most respected wide receivers of his generation (Fitzgerald) all decided that the smart place to put money was software for public parks. The unsexciting read is that athletes like sports-adjacent deals. The more interesting read is that people who have spent their lives inside recreation - who know exactly how badly a youth league can be run - looked at Rec and recognized a real problem being solved. Durant and Rich Kleiman's Thirty Five Ventures and Montana's Liquid 2 Ventures are serious funds; this is a bet, not a photo op.

Rec's stated mission is plain: make it as easy as possible for everyone to access sports facilities, pick up new hobbies, and connect with their community. The company describes its own team, without much polish, as former softball-league organizers, community-pool lifeguards, and "minivan-driving soccer dads" who happen to have also built products at Google and Uber. That combination - civic familiarity plus consumer-tech craft - is the pitch. You want the people rebuilding recreation software to have actually stood behind a rec-center desk, and also to know what a good checkout flow feels like.

There is a bigger idea underneath, which the company calls "powering the world's play." The claim is that recreation is a kind of third place that mostly missed the internet - the gym, the field, the pool, the pickleball court - and that making it frictionless is not a trivial convenience but a way to get more people off the couch and into their communities. Whether that fully pencils out as a venture-scale market is the open question every skeptic will ask. Rec's answer so far is: 100+ cities, growing revenue, and a Series A.