The Message That Changed Everything

Post No. 2 in our series on what we're building at Rallie — and why.

Every company has a moment it points back to later and says: that's where the road turned. Ours arrived as a LinkedIn message.

But let me back up.

Searching Without Forcing It

In January and February of 2026, I was deep in the search for the right way to build what Rallie was always meant to become — a true coaching platform, integrated with our machine. How do we take a great piece of hardware and give it intelligence? I was talking to developers. I had posted on Upwork. I was taking calls, reading proposals, comparing approaches.

Nothing fit. And I had learned enough by then to know the difference between momentum and motion. I knew the answer was out there. I just refused to force it.

February 20th

Then, on February 20th, a message landed in my LinkedIn inbox. It was from Sander Vitez, the CEO of DinkMate — a vision-based AI platform built for pickleball. He was pitching his company and wanted to set up a call.

Vision-based AI. In pickleball. You can imagine my interest.

I wrote back: "I like what you are doing. Please see what I'm doing." And before we ever spoke, I asked the only question that mattered to me: How can we integrate with your technology?

His reply came quickly: "Hi Eric, awesome product. We can integrate DinkMate for sure. Can we arrange a meeting next week?"

We've all had those LinkedIn exchanges. They usually go nowhere. This one became a meeting. The meeting became another meeting. And those meetings became daily conversations on WhatsApp — not quick texts, but hour-long voice calls, every single day.

Two Companies, One Conversation

What we were really talking about, day after day, was bigger than an integration. We were asking whether Rallie and DinkMate were better as one business than two.

Both products stand on their own. The Rallie machine has proven itself in the market. DinkMate's vision AI is the kind of technology I'd been describing in my business plan since day one. The question was how a hardware company and a SaaS company fit together — and whether they should.

The timing made the question urgent. I was just beginning to raise money for Rallie, roughly $500,000 to build the next version of the machine, a hardware-intensive effort to elevate the design, integrate vision engineering, and build out the app. At the very same time, Sander was raising roughly $500,000 to fund DinkMate's continued development and a go-to-market push into the US.

Two companies. Two raises. One increasingly obvious overlap.

What the Investors Taught Me

Here's where it got eye-opening.

My conversations with investors about Rallie had been good — but when I changed the pitch, when I brought DinkMate's technology into the story and went from a hardware company to a hardware-plus-SaaS company, something shifted. Investors who hadn't said no, but had clearly drifted toward no, came back to the table.

The lesson was clear. In a crowded ball machine market, investors who don't know you aren't lining up to back a pure hardware play at this stage. That road runs through Kickstarter. But hardware with intelligence — a machine connected to a real AI platform — that's a different company. That's a different conversation.

The Hard Questions

By the end of February, I'd gone from searching for a development partner, to raising capital, to spending every day in conversation with Sander and Marcell — DinkMate's other founder — working through questions that don't have easy answers:

What does a Rallie and DinkMate collaboration actually look like? A merger? An acquisition? A license agreement?
Who owns the IP? Is this a Hungarian company or a US company?
How do two cap tables — including DinkMate's major investor — come together while both companies are mid-raise?

These aren't small questions. They're the kind that determine whether two companies become one — or stay friendly competitors who almost did something great together.

In the next post, I'll take you inside those conversations — the late-night calls, the whiteboard scenarios, the moments we thought we had it figured out and the moments we knew we didn't.

I won't spoil the ending. Honestly, we're still writing it.

The door had opened. The only thing we knew for certain was that we had to walk through it the right way.

Eric Fransen
Founder & CEO, Rallie