Hepmil Co-Founder Adrian Ang Launches Finance Sector Pickleball Tournament in Singapore

Adrian Ang built a pickleball court on a rooftop in Orchard Road. Then he decided that wasn't enough.

The co-founder of Hepmil Media Group is organizing the PickleX Cup (Finance Invitational), billed as the first-ever invitational pickleball tournament for companies in the finance sector. The event is scheduled for March 26 at Singapore Expo, bringing together up to eight financial institutions to compete on the court. Ang also envisions a one-day finals tournament in the fourth quarter to crown the overall PickleX Cup winners, suggesting the March invitational is the opening move in a longer competitive arc.

The tournament is the latest chapter in what has become a rapid, all-consuming conversion to the sport. Ang, 39, first picked up a paddle in December 2024 at a media invitational. His team won. That was apparently all the permission he needed. "After the tournament, I gathered some friends and we are on the court a few times a week," he said. By the time the Business Times profiled him in March 2026, that frequency had climbed to as often as five times a week. "The addiction is real," he said, with the trademark chuckle that first made him a recognizable face at SGAG more than a decade ago.

Less than a month after Hepmil's acquisition by French advertising and public relations giant Publicis Groupe, described as a rare exit for a South-east Asian start-up, Ang opened Pickle & Bones: a covered pickleball court on the rooftop of Trifecta at Somerset, right in the heart of Orchard Road. The name is characteristically self-aware. "I think people see me now as someone who is addicted to pickleball, that I will probably play until the day I die, or until I become a skeleton and all bones. So, yeah, that's how the name came about and it has a nice ring to it," Ang explained. His stated purpose for the court is straightforward: "There's nothing like having your own space to play at, and to bring the community together."

The acquisition, which thrust Ang and his business partner and junior college classmate Karl Mak into the spotlight, was described as a little over four months old at the time of the Business Times feature. The Publicis deal appears to have given Ang room to move on projects like Pickle & Bones and PickleX Cup with the kind of energy that suggests a man who no longer needs to spend every hour worrying about runway.

Part of the appeal Ang sees in pickleball, particularly for a corporate invitational format, is its low barrier to entry. "There are other sports where the barriers to entry at the start can be quite high, but pickleball is different. It's relatively easy for beginners like myself to pick it up after a short while," he said. That accessibility argument has real numbers behind it: according to data from research agency Market.us, over 800 million people across Asia have played the sport at least once.

Singapore's pickleball calendar is filling up quickly. Bank of Singapore is separately hosting an invite-only corporate challenge at the National Stadium in 2026, and Singapore is set to host its first international amateur pickleball championship in April 2026. The PickleX Cup slots into a finance and corporate sector that appears increasingly receptive to the sport as a networking and team-building vehicle.

Ang's pitch to those eight financial institutions is essentially the same one he makes about pickleball generally: "It just gets more and more fun because it doesn't matter what skill level you're at. People of all backgrounds and abilities can get together and play a decent game.