Bengaluru’s Matiks closed a $10 million pre-Series A this week, led by General Catalyst with Ronnie Screwvala and existing backers InfoEdge Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners, and Untitled joining in. The platform runs multiplayer math and puzzle games, “mind sports” in the company’s own framing, and says daily users went from roughly 22,000 earlier this year to over 300,000 by September. The money is earmarked for international expansion, starting with the US before Japan and South Korea, plus AI tools to help players build their own games.
The category most investors would have passed on
A math quiz app competing for attention against short video and gacha mechanics sounds like a hard pitch on paper. What Matiks appears to have sold investors instead is a retention story: a product built on repeatable, skill-based competition rather than one-time virality. Mind sports as a category has no obvious ceiling problem the way a single viral format does, because the loop of play, rank, and play again doesn’t decay the way a trend does.
Naming the category is doing real work here
Calling a math game a “mind sport” rather than an “edtech app” or a “casual game” is a positioning choice with consequences. Edtech in India carries the baggage of a sector that spent heavily on growth and underdelivered on outcomes. Casual gaming gets valued on engagement metrics investors have learned to discount. “Mind sport” borrows credibility from chess and poker instead - skill-based, competitive, and easier to defend against the regulatory scrutiny real-money gaming has attracted. The label was chosen before the funding, not after it.
The actual bet is on habit, not geography
Going to the US, Japan, and South Korea before the rest of India’s tier-one cities is a statement about where the willingness to pay for a habit-forming game is already proven, not where the addressable market is largest on paper. Matiks is betting that a daily-use product earns the right to expand on usage data rather than population size, a sequencing choice a slower-growing competitor couldn’t afford to copy even if it wanted to.