At five in the morning, the phone rang. Jarrette Schule had built a golf management platform and put it into a real course in San Antonio. Now golfers were lining up, and the app was crashing. In his account on the Tech Caddie podcast, the message was brutally economical: “Your app’s crashing.” A software engineer can tolerate an elegant problem. A golf operator, with customers waiting at the door, needs it fixed.
- The job: connect the tee sheet, checkout, payments and customer record.
- The useful trick: turn a cancellation into an opening another golfer can book.
- The stakes: golf inventory expires when its tee time passes.
That early beta, launched in 2018, lasted roughly a year and a half. It is a useful place to begin the story of TenFore Golf, because the company’s pitch is easiest to understand at the counter. Golf management software has to survive the moment when a beautiful plan meets a queue.
The appointment you cannot store
Consider a Saturday tee time. Once its minute has passed, the course cannot sell it tomorrow. A restaurant can sometimes sell an unused bottle next week; a pro shop can keep a glove on the shelf. The booking desk has no such luxury. Its inventory travels in one direction, at the speed of a clock.
TenFore sells cloud-based management software to the businesses responsible for those appointments: public courses, private clubs, resorts, municipalities and multi-course operators. Its platform joins tee sheets and reservations to retail and food-and-beverage point of sale, integrated payments, marketing and reporting. A round and a clubhouse purchase can belong to the same operational system.
One concrete example arrived in July 2025. NextUp, TenFore’s native waitlist, lets golfers choose automatic booking when a matching slot opens, or receive a message and confirm manually. Operators choose payment rules. They can also offer premium pricing for automatic-booking priority. The waitlist sits inside the management platform, close to the inventory it is meant to sell.
A cancellation needs a destination
In January 2026, TenFore added Tee Time Confirm. Golfers must actively confirm within a window the course defines. Canceled inventory returns to the tee sheet; the automated waitlist can offer it to waiting players. The launch announcement says the capability is included for TenFore clients at no additional cost.
The interesting part is the sequence. A reminder alone can produce a reply. A waitlist alone can identify demand. Connecting the two gives the reply somewhere to go. Operators still need sensible confirmation windows and waiting golfers willing to play. Automation can move demand into an opening; it cannot conjure demand for an unpopular hour.
The same logic reaches marketing. TenFore’s behavior-based service, launched in May 2025, can respond to play history, purchases or cancellations. A golfer who has stayed away can receive a return invitation. TenFore’s marketing team helps build journeys, run campaigns and review performance. The offer includes execution, a useful detail for a course whose staff already have several jobs.
The builder meets the morning rush
Schule founded TenFore in 2015. Before building, he gathered advice from golf operators. The beta then supplied a harsher form of feedback. In the podcast, he described early financing of $100,000 from a friend, alongside credit and personal retirement savings. That account puts a price on the years before institutional capital: money, mornings and a great deal of debugging.
Jonathan Wride joined in 2023 to lead and build the business. His background includes co-founding Supreme Golf. The pairing puts a software builder alongside someone with experience growing golf technology businesses. In a sponsored Golf Inc. interview, Wride made the operating priority plain: “Support and service have to come first.”
“Support and service have to come first.”Jonathan Wride · CEO
This is a crowded market. Club Caddie, foreUP and Lightspeed Golf also offer broad management systems. TenFore’s argument rests on its proprietary platform, native booking automation and close work with operators. A convincing evaluation therefore belongs in the details: show a cancellation, a restaurant transaction and a reconciliation report, rather than another slide promising everything.
Houston makes the question public
In March 2026, TenFore announced a partnership with Houston for tee time operations at Memorial Park and Sharpstown Park. The rollout includes residency verification, booking safeguards, confirmations and automated waitlists. Memorial Park also gets Standby, an on-site walk-up waitlist, plus self-service kiosks.
A municipal course adds a complication to ordinary commerce. Some players qualify for resident rates; others do not. TenFore’s ID.me integration verifies identity and eligibility before preferred-rate bookings. With consent, verified information can reach course staff. That connects an online reservation to the person arriving to play, rather than leaving the check-in desk to untangle the discount.
Resorts have a different handoff. TenFore’s OPERA Cloud integration lets staff look up hotel guests and charge golf, shop or restaurant purchases to their rooms. Here the value comes from following the guest across departments. Nobody on holiday has ever asked for a more complicated bill.
Seven million dollars, and two new doors
TenFore announced a $7 million Series A led by Blueprint Equity in January 2026. Its stated uses include development, sales and onboarding capacity, with complementary acquisitions also contemplated. Onboarding matters: replacing the software beneath a working course involves migration, configuration and training, while tomorrow’s golfers still expect to arrive.
Led by Blueprint Equity
September brought two distinct partnerships. CivicPlus will resell TenFore to local governments, handling contracting, billing and renewals. CourseRev.ai connects its automated Voice Concierge to availability and booking, giving callers a route to reserve when staff are busy or the counter is closed.
The lesson travels beyond golf. Trace the appointment from inquiry to payment, then trace what happens when it changes. Every handoff deserves an owner. TenFore’s wager is that an operator can run a better day when those handoffs happen inside a connected system. The earliest test came at five in the morning. The next one arrives whenever the phone rings.