Originals · Startup · Startups & Fintech
Matiks raises $10 Mn from General Catalyst to take its brain games app global, starting with the US
The Bengaluru social gaming startup says 2.2 million people played 48 million math, memory, logic and puzzle games on its app in September, and it is building an AI tool that lets users make their own games.
Matiks, a Bengaluru social gaming startup built around math, memory, logic and puzzle games, has raised $10 million in a pre-Series A round led by General Catalyst, the company announced on October 26. Ronnie Screwvala joined the round, along with existing investors Info Edge Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners and Untitled Ventures. TechCrunch reported that the company has now raised more than $13.5 million in total, after a $3.1 million round led by Tanglin in August 2025, according to Entrackr.
The app lets players practise against bots and then compete head to head with real people, with daily challenges, quests and streaks. Matiks says 2.2 million people played 48 million games on it in September, and that daily active users have passed 300,000, up from 22,000 earlier in the year, TechCrunch and YourStory reported. The company also told YourStory that players who complete a seven day streak show 62% retention a month later. These are the company's own figures.
Most players are in India, co-founder and CEO Sudhanshu Bhatia told TechCrunch, but the app is seeing use in the US, South Korea and Japan. The new money will go first into a US push before other large international markets, new games and social features, and an AI powered game creation platform that lets users build and publish brain games without writing code. TechCrunch said an experimental version of that tool, called Jelo, is already live, and that Matiks only started testing a paid subscription this month alongside in-game purchases.
Bhatia, who has a background in competitive mental math, started working on the idea while he was at American Express. He founded Matiks in 2024 with college friends Sushant Timmapur and Mohan Kumar, and the company has 41 full time employees, according to TechCrunch. "We are not trying to get people off their phones; we are trying to give them something better to do on them," Bhatia said in the company's statement.
