Volair Is Licensing 11SIX24’s HexGrit Technology — And It’s a Big Deal for Pickleball Paddle Innovation

The pickleball paddle surface wars are heating up, and most brands are playing the same game: pour resources into R&D, slap a proprietary name on whatever comes out, and hope the marketing holds up longer than the grit does. It’s a familiar cycle, and players who’ve watched their once-grippy paddle turn into a smooth plastic slab after a few months know exactly how that story ends.

But something different just happened in the paddle industry, and it’s worth paying attention to. Volair — an established paddle brand with a legitimate following — has decided to license HexGrit surface technology from 11SIX24, a fellow paddle company that developed and owns the technology. One competitor paying another competitor to use its innovation. In pickleball. In 2026.

It sounds unusual because it is unusual. And that’s exactly why it matters.

What Is HexGrit and Why Does It Matter?

Before getting into the business side of this deal, it helps to understand what HexGrit actually is and why brands are paying attention to it in the first place.

For anyone newer to pickleball or paddle technology in general, here’s the core problem the industry has been struggling with: paddle surfaces lose their texture over time. That texture — commonly called “grit” — is what allows players to generate heavy spin on the ball. A fresh paddle out of the box can feel incredible, biting into the ball and generating spin that makes dinks drop sharply and drives tail off unpredictably. But after weeks or months of regular play, that same surface can feel almost slick, and the spin potential drops noticeably.

Brands have tried all kinds of solutions. Different materials, different surface coatings, different manufacturing processes. Some have worked better than others. But durability combined with high spin output has remained one of the hardest combinations to crack consistently.

HexGrit, developed by 11SIX24 founder David Groechel and his team, is built around a silicon-carbide surface material that is specifically engineered to address this problem. The texture is designed to hold up over the life of the paddle rather than degrading quickly with use. Players and reviewers who have tested 11SIX24 paddles have noted that the spin performance stays more consistent over time compared to many competing surfaces. That reputation didn’t happen overnight — it was earned through real-world use and honest feedback from the pickleball community.

The technology has become one of the defining features of the 11SIX24 brand. And now, through a formal licensing arrangement, it’s going to be featured on Volair paddles as well.

Why Volair Chose to License Instead of Build

Volair founder and CEO Ryan Cohen was candid about the reasoning, and his explanation is more straightforward than you might expect from a brand decision that breaks from industry convention.

“Our team is capable of developing and releasing our own grit technology, but we would rather work with HexGrit as it is already established in the market as the best long-lasting grit,” Cohen said. He added simply: “The spin is insane.”

That’s a refreshingly honest take. Cohen isn’t pretending that Volair couldn’t develop something comparable eventually. He’s saying that HexGrit already exists, it already works, it already has a reputation, and spending time and money trying to recreate it from scratch doesn’t make sense when there’s a path to just use the real thing.

This kind of thinking is common in other industries — technology licensing, patent agreements, and cross-brand manufacturing partnerships happen constantly in sectors like consumer electronics, automotive, and pharmaceuticals — but it’s relatively rare in the still-young pickleball paddle space, where most brands treat their surface technology as a closely guarded competitive advantage. The idea of actively sharing that advantage with another brand, even for a fee, runs counter to how most companies in this space operate.

Volair’s willingness to approach it differently says something meaningful about how Cohen views the competitive landscape. Rather than treating innovation as a zero-sum game where every advantage has to be proprietary, he’s treating it as a practical question: what gives our customers the best product?

The first paddle to come out of this partnership is the Volair CMD, which incorporates HexGrit technology directly into its surface. Early preorders are beginning to reach customers, and initial feedback from the Volair team and paddle reviewers has reportedly been positive. But Cohen has also confirmed that this isn’t a one-time collaboration — Volair plans to use HexGrit on all of its performance paddles going forward. That’s a significant commitment, and it suggests this partnership is meant to be foundational rather than experimental.

What 11SIX24 Gets Out of the Deal

For 11SIX24, the decision to license HexGrit to Volair wasn’t immediately obvious. Groechel admits he had to think it through carefully. Handing your signature technology to another brand comes with real risks — brand dilution, competitive exposure, manufacturing complications, legal overhead. These aren’t trivial concerns.

But Groechel ultimately saw the upside clearly: “I think it really validates the technology,” he said. “It validates the technology. He gets something that works for his customers.”

There’s a lot packed into that statement. When another established brand decides your technology is worth paying for — rather than trying to replicate it on their own — it sends a strong signal to the entire market. It’s the kind of third-party endorsement that no amount of marketing budget can fully replicate. Volair is essentially telling the pickleball world that HexGrit is legit, not because 11SIX24 asked them to say so, but because they decided to build their product line around it.

Groechel also noted that Volair and 11SIX24 serve somewhat different customer bases, which makes the arrangement feel less like enabling direct competition and more like expanding HexGrit’s reach into market segments that 11SIX24 might not be fully capturing on its own. Both brands benefit. Volair gets a proven surface technology with an established reputation. 11SIX24 gets validation, revenue from the licensing arrangement, and broader visibility for HexGrit as a technology platform rather than just a product feature.

It’s worth noting that 11SIX24 has also filed a patent application related to HexGrit, which adds another layer of significance to Volair’s decision to license rather than attempt to reverse-engineer. The legal and manufacturing logistics involved in these kinds of partnerships are real, and Groechel made clear that future licensing deals — if any happen — would need to make sense across all of those dimensions. This isn’t going to turn into an open-source situation where any brand can start using HexGrit. The technology is protected, and 11SIX24 will be selective about who it partners with.

What This Means for the Broader Paddle Industry

The pickleball paddle market is maturing fast. There are more brands, more paddles, and more competing surface technologies than ever before. Every brand seems to have its own proprietary grit name, its own claimed durability advantage, and its own marketing language designed to convince buyers that this surface is the one that won’t let them down after three months.

Some of those claims hold up. Many don’t. And players who have been around long enough have become rightfully skeptical of surface promises that look great in a spec sheet but fade quickly on the court.

Against that backdrop, the Volair and 11SIX24 partnership stands out for a few reasons. First, it represents a more honest approach to product development. Instead of pretending to have invented something new, Volair acknowledged what already works and chose to use it. Second, it signals that HexGrit has reached a level of credibility where other brands are willing to build around it — which in turn gives players more reason to take the technology seriously. Third, it opens up a potential model for how the paddle industry could evolve, where technology licensing becomes a recognized pathway rather than an anomaly.

Whether other brands follow this lead remains to be seen. The instinct to keep technology proprietary is strong, and for good reason — your surface is your differentiation in a crowded market. But the Volair-11SIX24 deal shows that there are cases where collaboration makes more sense than competition, and that both sides can come out ahead.

Breaking It Down Simply: What You Actually Need to Know as a Player

If you’re a pickleball player and not particularly interested in the business side of all this, here’s what this deal actually means for you in plain terms.

Paddle surface texture directly affects how much spin you can generate. More grit equals more spin potential. The problem is that most surfaces wear down over time, which means the spin you got on day one isn’t the spin you get six months later. This has been one of the most consistent complaints from players who care about their game.

HexGrit was specifically designed to solve that problem. It’s made from silicon carbide, which is an extremely hard material that holds its texture longer than many conventional surface coatings. Players who have used 11SIX24 paddles have generally reported that the spin performance stays more consistent over the life of the paddle compared to other options on the market.

Now, Volair — a brand that has its own loyal following and strong reputation for paddle quality — is putting HexGrit on its paddles too. Starting with the Volair CMD and extending to all of its performance paddles going forward. So if you’ve been curious about HexGrit but weren’t sure about trying a new brand, this gives you another option to experience the technology in a paddle that might already fit your preferences in terms of shape, weight, or feel.

It also means that the technology has been independently validated by a brand that had no obligation to use it and could have developed its own alternative. That’s meaningful. When a competitor says your technology is better than what they could build themselves, that’s about as credible an endorsement as you can get in this industry.

The Bigger Picture: Innovation Doesn’t Always Mean Starting From Scratch

There’s something worth sitting with here beyond the paddle specs and the business arrangements. The Volair and 11SIX24 partnership reflects a mindset about innovation that doesn’t get talked about enough in the pickleball industry — or in most industries, for that matter.

Innovation is often framed as invention. Something that didn’t exist before now exists, and the company that made it happen gets credit and competitive advantage. That’s a real and important form of innovation. But there’s another form that’s just as valuable: recognizing what already works, having the humility to acknowledge it, and making smart decisions about how to build around it rather than competing with it unnecessarily.

Ryan Cohen’s decision to call David Groechel and ask about licensing instead of starting an internal R&D project to reinvent the wheel is an example of that second kind of thinking. It’s practical, it’s efficient, and it ultimately serves the player better because the energy that would have gone into developing a competing surface can go into other aspects of paddle design and performance.

For Groechel, the decision to say yes — despite the risks and the complexity — reflects confidence in what 11SIX24 has built and a willingness to see HexGrit as a technology platform rather than just a product feature. That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about competitive advantage.

In the middle of a crowded, noisy paddle market where everyone is claiming to have the best surface and the most durable grit, these two brands just demonstrated that there’s a different way to compete. Not by shouting louder than everyone else, but by building something worth licensing and then being smart enough to use it.

That’s a win worth noting, regardless of which paddle you end up buying.