Inside Ten x You: How Sachin Tendulkar is rethinking the cricket shoe
What happens when India’s greatest cricketer treats footwear as an engineering problem, not an endorsement
There is a 9 millimetre spike at the heel of Ten x You’s Centurion Pro Batsman shoe that does not touch the ground when you walk. It sits dormant until you slip, diving into the surface to arrest your fall.
Perfecting that single spike took Ten x You co-founders Sachin Tendulkar and Karthik Gurumurthy a good two months of engineering and repeated arguments over structural integrity. They were hunting for the exact point at which a shoe must hold firm when the batsman pivots for a sweep shot.
Two months after the October 10, 2025, launch, orders across its range have crossed 5,000, spanning 250 Indian towns, almost entirely without promotion. Ayush Mhatre, the 18-year-old Mumbai opener who broke through with the Chennai Super Kings in the IPL 2025, and now captains the India Under-19 side, is already wearing them.
The engineering began with a simple question: Why are almost all professional cricket shoes sold in India designed elsewhere?
Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV Partners, which backed Ten x You through its Surge accelerator programme alongside Whiteboard Capital, believes the answer matters beyond cricket footwear. “We believe this is the best cricket shoe on planet earth,” he told The State of Play. “It is only fair that it comes from the nation that is the world’s best in cricket.”
The maidan problem
In May 2024, Gurumurthy led German shoe designers through Mumbai’s famed maidans in brutal pre-monsoon heat. They documented complaints from academies and coaches. A pattern emerged: international shoes were too narrow, causing heel pain and failing on hard maidans. The shoes looked right, but felt wrong.
Tendulkar conveyed the severity during one of their hours-long sessions by knocking sharply on a table in front of him. That, he told Gurumurthy, is how hard the Melbourne Cricket Ground pitch feels. Before one Australia tour, Tendulkar recalled taking his shoes to a cobbler to have his spikes sharpened, as regular ones merely skate across the unforgiving surface.
“These were real, practical problems coming from people,” Gurumurthy says. “It wasn’t abstract. It was heel pain and narrow fits, and grip issues on dry surfaces. So we said, ‘Fine, we’ll solve it.’”
