Matiks, a Bengaluru based social gaming startup, has raised $10 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by General Catalyst. Entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala joined the round, along with existing investors Info Edge Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners and Untitled Ventures.
The company announced the round on 26 October 2026. It said the fresh capital takes its total funding past $13.5 million. The money will fund international expansion, new games and social features, and an artificial intelligence powered platform that lets users build and publish games without writing code.
Where the money goes
Matiks will start its global push in the United States before entering other markets. It plans to invest in engineering, artificial intelligence, product design and growth, and to scale creator partnerships and distribution. Localisation for South Korea and Japan is on the roadmap, where early players have already appeared.
In September 2026, 2.2 million people played 48 million games on the platform. Daily active users rose from about 22,000 earlier in the year to more than 300,000 by September, more than double the June figure.
Retention looks strong for a consumer app. Users who finish a seven day streak show 62 percent retention a month later, while some early cohorts still retain 32 percent of users at week 52. The single player puzzle feed SNAC has stretched sessions to about three times their earlier length.
How Matiks works
Matiks offers games across maths, memory, logic and puzzles. Players practise against bots, then duel real opponents, and collect points, streaks and rewards through challenges and quests. The company has also launched Jelo, an experimental platform that uses artificial intelligence to let users create games for others to play.
The company was founded in September 2024 by three friends from IIT Guwahati. Sudhanshu Bhatia is a competitive mental maths champion who began working on the idea while building an anti money laundering strategy at American Express. Mohan Kumar led development at Sprinklr, while Sushant Timmapur built products at Flipkart.
This is not the first outside backing for the team. In August 2025, Matiks raised $3.1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Tanglin Venture Partners, with Info Edge Ventures and angels including boAt co-founder Aman Gupta and Unacademy co-founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini.
What the founder says
We started Matiks with a simple belief: using your brain can be just as fun and addictive as any other form of entertainment.
The line sums up the pitch behind the round. Matiks is not selling a study tool or a casual puzzle app. It is selling competition around the mind, with leaderboards, clubs and daily contests that reward practice the way sport rewards training.
Why this round matters
The creator platform puts Matiks in a contest that now includes Google, whose Playground lets users build games with tools. Matiks has one edge here. Its games already have an audience that plays daily, so new user made games arrive in front of real players rather than an empty room.
Indian gaming startups have drawn steady investor interest as social and skill based formats grow. KeeVurds earlier covered Mayhem Studios and its $20 million raise from Sequoia India and Steadview, a sign that investors keep backing game makers with proven audiences.
Matiks now employs 41 people full time. That small team will be tested by the global plan, since localisation, creator tools and new markets each demand attention at the same time.
The honest view
The growth numbers are real, but they are also narrow. Most players are still in India, and paid subscriptions only began testing this month. If the United States launch stalls, or if creators do not build games people return to, the story could cool quickly.
Even so, a global investor backing a small Indian team is a genuine vote of confidence. The next test is not downloads. It is whether daily players turn into paying subscribers, and whether user made games can hold their attention as well as the games Matiks built itself.
