The key facts

  • Matiks raised $10 million in a pre-Series A round from General Catalyst, Ronnie Screwvala, and existing investors; the company has raised over $13.5 million in total.
  • The daily audience grew from 22,000 at the start of the year to more than 300,000 by September, with MAU at 2.2 million.
  • The company is testing a subscription and developing the experimental game-creation platform Jelo amid competition from Google Playground.

The Round and Investors

The Indian gaming company Matiks announced raising $10 million in a 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. Including this deal, the company's total funding has exceeded $13.5 million, TechCrunch reports.

Audience Growth

The Matiks app has been around for two years, but gained notable popularity this year: according to the company, the number of daily users grew from 22,000 at the start of the year to more than 300,000 by September, and the monthly audience in September reached 2.2 million people. It was this growth, TechCrunch notes, that attracted new investors.

Product and Monetization

The founders — Sudhanshu Bhatia, Mohan Kumar, and Sushant Timmapur — are college friends. Bhatia, who has experience in competitive mental arithmetic, came up with the idea while working at American Express on anti-money-laundering strategy. In the app, users choose from Math, Puzzle, Memory, and Logic categories, practice against bots, and then play against real opponents, earning points and maintaining streaks. Until recently, the company focused on audience growth; this month it began testing a subscription with game analysis, hints, and practice, and in-app purchases are also available. According to Bhatia, most players are in India, but there is demand from the US, South Korea, and Japan, and localization is planned for the latter two markets.

Context and Plans

TechCrunch notes that mobile gaming growth has recently slowed amid the flood of AI-generated content on platforms, and Matiks positions itself as an alternative to such feeds. At the same time, the company is not abandoning AI: it has launched Jelo, an experimental game-creation platform where users can make their own games for others. There are many competitors in this space, including Google's new Playground platform. Matiks has 41 full-time employees; the raised funds will go toward scaling Jelo and entering new markets. General Catalyst partner Rahul Humayun told the publication that the product's iteration pace and user engagement gave the fund encouraging signals, and early monetization results look promising.

Significance of the Event

The round shows that investors are willing to back gaming products growing on 'healthy' content despite the overall slowdown in the mobile gaming market. For users, this means new modes and, likely, localizations; for the industry, it means intensified competition in the user-generated games segment, where Google Playground is already present. It remains unclear how quickly the trial subscription will start generating revenue: the company only recently began testing it.