Sansan becomes pickleball's top-tier sponsor in Japan, eyeing a 2032 Olympic push
Sansan, the business-card-scanning SaaS company that opened Tokyo's largest pickleball venue this month, has gone further: it is now Pickleball Japan's top-tier sponsor, the newly created Grand Slam Partner tier, funding the national team as the sport chases a place at the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
Sansan, the Tokyo-listed SaaS company behind the business-card and invoice-management platforms Sansan and Bill One, said on 17 July that it has become the top-tier sponsor of Pickleball Japan, a tier the federation calls Grand Slam Partner, according to Sansan's own newsroom. The federation, formally the General Incorporated Foundation Pickleball Japan, had only just gained official recognition from the Japan Sport Association in June 2026.
The backing goes beyond a logo. Sansan said it will fully fund Pickleball X, a professional-development project it has backed since January 2025; extend individual sponsorship to national players Shinsawa Nasae and Sawaki Kei; take the title sponsorship of the 2026 Japan national team; and support the federation's tournament calendar through the year. The company said the effort is aimed at pickleball's push for inclusion at the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, an ambition the sport's international bodies have floated but which is far from decided.
The sponsorship follows Sansan's move into real estate rather than the other way round. Having started domestic promotional activity in February 2024, the company opened what it calls Tokyo's first large dedicated pickleball facility, Sansan Pickleball Court Ikebukuro, on 10 July. That is an unusual sequence for a SaaS company: most corporate sports backing buys a logo on a jersey, not a court.
Read as a Promotion play, the move sits inside a fast-growing category. Sansan cites a domestic competitor base of roughly 330,000, up sevenfold year on year, against a potential market it puts at 11.89 million, alongside a US precedent of some 50 million adults having played the game in the past year. For a company with no obvious retail footprint of its own, sponsoring a fast-growing participation sport is one of the few Promotion levers that builds recognition among the salaried, health-conscious clientele it sells software to — and owning the court, not just the jersey, gives it a venue to bring clients and staff onto in person. Whether the bet also proves prescient depends on a decision entirely outside Sansan's control: whether pickleball actually makes the 2032 Olympic programme.