Mobile gaming has stopped growing, and much of what lands in feeds every day is generated. That gap is exactly where an app that sells mental arithmetic is expanding.
Matiks, an India-based company, reports more than 300,000 daily users in September, up from 22,000 earlier in the year. Monthly actives reached 2.2 million that month. On Monday the startup announced a $10 million pre-Series A round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Indian entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala and existing investors Info Edge Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners and Untitled Ventures. Total funding now stands above $13.5 million.
The product is deliberately old-fashioned. Users pick one of four categories — maths, puzzle, memory, logic — and play either against bots to practise or against real opponents. Challenges, quests, points, streaks and unlockable games sit on top. Matiks was founded by Sudhanshu Bhatia, Mohan Kumar and Sushant Timmapur, who are college friends. Bhatia has a competitive mental-maths background and says he started on the idea while working on an anti-money-laundering strategy at American Express.
"For the last 10 years, the platforms have made entertainment consumption easy, but much of it is brain slop," Bhatia said. The team looked at how to make maths-adjacent games as entertaining as other content. From mental maths he knew a competitive ecosystem existed; the same turned out to be true for puzzles and memory. Hence the dual format: practice against a bot, then duel a human.
What stands out is the monetisation — or its absence. Matiks has concentrated on growth and only began testing a subscription this month, unlocking game analysis, tips and practice. In-game purchases let players skip challenges, hold a streak or boost XP. That is a company of 41 full-time employees that is only now starting to charge, holding 300,000 people a day.
Most players are in India, with traffic from the US, South Korea and Japan; localisation is planned for the latter two. That is where the model gets tested. Mental arithmetic as a competitive sport is unevenly embedded across cultures, and a subscription for games you finish in minutes is a different proposition from one for series.
The real tension is in the expansion plan. Matiks positions itself against AI-generated content — and has simultaneously launched an experimental platform called Jelo, where users build their own games and let others play them. That puts it against Google's new Playground offering, in a market where the tools themselves are becoming interchangeable. The $10 million is intended mainly to scale that business.
Rahul Humayan, a partner at General Catalyst, cited pace and engagement: the vision, the product and above all the community were "truly N of 1," he told TechCrunch. Whether that is enough turns on a question no user count answers: whether people will pay for thinking games, or only for playing them free against someone else.
