Notey has closed a $3 million seed round that includes a $1 million non-dilutive development grant from Malta Enterprise, and has formally opened a Maltese subsidiary to serve as the company’s European operation. The company also announced a distribution partnership with Telemach, a United Group operator, to bring the platform to households across the Balkans.
Notey’s European base in Malta
The Maltese subsidiary, wholly owned by holding company Notey Inc., will host product and engineering capacity, manage European school and conservatory partnerships, handle publisher and label relationships, and run distribution across EU markets. Malta gives Notey an English-speaking, EU-based home and access to a pool of gaming, software and creative-technology talent. The subsidiary also enables Notey to contract with European schools and partners inside the EU, work in local languages and curricula, and hire across the continent.
Momentum and product expansion
The seed funding comes as Notey scales: the platform has grown to more than 100,000 consumer users and is active in 60 schools across four school districts. Notey is a Techstars 2023 company and a recipient of an InnoVision Award for Education and Technology. The new capital will support deeper platform engagement, accelerate product development, expand distribution and fund hiring in both Europe and the United States.
Notey is advancing several product and partnership initiatives. The AI-native WorldBuilder, which lets users create game worlds and music-learning experiences using generative AI around an adaptive curriculum, is preparing for a public launch. The company plans to broaden instrument support, targeting piano, voice and recorder experiences for release by Q1 2027. New partnerships include EdMusica to extend reach in Latin America and collaborations with symphony orchestras such as the Slovenian Philharmonic to deepen young people’s connection to music.
In the Balkans, Notey’s distribution partnership with Telemach—an operator providing mobile, broadband and pay-TV services in Slovenia, Croatia and the wider region—creates a new sales channel that places the platform in front of families through an existing consumer provider rather than building market reach country by country.
Team, hiring and next steps
Notey will expand headcount across engineering, product and design, content and curriculum, and school partnerships, hiring into its Malta office and its United States operations. The company currently operates in New York City, Columbia, South Carolina, and Valletta, Malta.
The founding team combines performance, engineering and education. Dr. Mak Grgić is CEO and co-founder; a four-time Grammy-nominated classical guitarist and recording artist, he has performed internationally, served as Assistant Professor of Guitar at the University of South Carolina School of Music and completed doctoral studies in arts leadership at the USC Thornton School of Music. Adithya Bellathur is CTO and co-founder; a machine learning engineer with research experience in reinforcement learning, computer vision and audio machine learning, he previously worked at Bloomberg and Amazon and leads engineering and the GenAI WorldBuilder. Yishai Pinchover is Chief Strategy Officer; he co-founded CodeMonkey, an educational coding platform later acquired by TAL Education Group, and has worked as an edtech investor and advisor.
“We are competing with everything else on a kid’s screen, and attention is measured in seconds,” said Dr. Mak Grgić. “Learning an instrument is hard; playing a game is easy and fun. People quit because they lose interest in their instrument too quickly, so we dreamt up a world where games are built to support real instrument practice. Notey serves as an entertainment-first learning solution, where practice becomes play, and where in the near future any user will be able to build their own gaming experience around the music they already love. That is the fight we picked, and I could not be more excited to be fighting it.”
With the seed round closed and the Malta Enterprise grant in place, Notey’s stated priorities are to deepen engagement, expand instrument coverage, grow its school footprint in the United States and the EU, use generative AI to increase the breadth of content on the platform, and build out teams in Malta and the United States.
