A Cape Breton startup has launched an online platform that helps golf course operators market their unsold tee-times at discounted prices, and is planning to release an app for players later this year.

Sydney-based InteGolf was founded by longtime IT entrepreneur Todd Chant, who previously ran a service company that specialized in working with golf courses. The platform’s Premium Tee Time booking service allows golf courses to set parameters for how it should discount tee times as they near expiry, then automates the process.

Chant plans to soon launch an app for individual golfers to track their play, likely by the end of this summer, building on a similar service InteGolf already offers for tournaments, as well as a travel booking system for users to book golf trips.

“The whole platform that we have developed over the last couple years has been in direct relationship with the golf courses and the industry,” said Chant in an interview. “We’ve worked hand-in-hand to figure out pain points, especially after COVID and during COVID, and come up with solutions that would help them increase their revenues, their (course) utilization — but also decrease their expenses and make things run smoother, more efficiently.”

InteGolf’s history dates back to 2019, when Chant pitched the idea to Golf Canada, the sport’s governing body. At the time, the product was called Easy Golf Tour. He said he temporarily "backburnered" the system after the pandemic disrupted business for courses and is now relaunching an updated version in Nova Scotia.

The idea was inspired by the more than a decade he spent providing IT services to golf courses and repeatedly noticing the same pain points across the industry.

“I was introduced to a lot of golf courses, the associations across Canada, Golf Canada,” he said. “You’re seeing the whole picture of the industry, not just one point of view, and every one of them had pain points that were causing issues.

“And the funny thing is … you could see that if you did certain things, you were actually resolving pain points across multiple levels of the industry.”

Golfers can access InteGolf tee time listings through the company’s website, as well as signing up for notifications with updates about bookings from specific courses. Chant is also working on a deal for Destination Cape Breton, the tourism agency, to integrate InteGolf into its website. He said other, similar integrations will be part of the company’s longer-term growth strategy. The partner websites will not have to pay InteGolf a fee, but the platform does charge golf courses 2.9 percent of each booking, regardless of how end users access the system.

An expansion in the United States is also on the horizon, but not until Chant and his team have proven out their business model in Canada first. He added he is eyeing a funding round later this year, building on $300,000 InteGolf raised from angel investors in 2023.

“You need to really test a product and make sure that it works 100 percent before taking it into the U.S.,” he said. “So we’re trying to get the Canadian market (first) to … make sure that we have all the issues worked out and fix the things that come up, make the user interfaces better before we head to the U.S.”