Notey Closes $3M Seed Round and Opens Its European Operation in Malta

Notey (Techstars 2023) has closed a $3M seed round. The round includes a $1M non-dilutive development grant from Malta Enterprise. Notey is also announcing a distribution partnership with Telemach, one of Southeast Europe's largest telecom operators, bringing the platform to households across the Balkans. The funding will support deeper platform engagement, new instruments and partnerships, a growing European operation, and hiring on both sides of the Atlantic as Notey turns music practice into play.

The round marks a major milestone for the music education, gaming, and practice platform. The new capital gives Notey the resources to accelerate product development, expand distribution, and grow the team as the company works toward its mission of building a platform where music practice becomes play.

Momentum Behind the Round

The seed round caps off a strong stretch for Notey. The platform has grown to more than 100,000 consumer users and has been active in 60 schools across 4 school districts. As Notey scales, the focus is shifting toward building lasting engagement and making the platform a fixture of everyday practice for music learners.

Notey's Maltese Subsidiary Powers Its European Expansion

Alongside the round, Notey has formally opened its European operation. The company's Maltese subsidiary, wholly owned by holding company Notey Inc., becomes the base for Notey's work across the European Union: product and engineering capacity, European school and conservatory partnerships, publisher and label relationships, and distribution across EU markets.

Malta gives Notey an English-speaking, EU-based home with a deep bench of gaming, software, and creative-technology talent, a combination that maps closely onto what Notey builds: game design, adaptive learning, and music. The subsidiary lets the company contract with European schools and partners inside the EU, work in local languages and curricula, and hire across the continent.

European expansion runs on the same product thesis that has worked in the United States. Practice becomes play, progress is measurable, and teachers keep visibility into what their students are actually doing between lessons.

Product and Partnerships on the Horizon

Notey is using this moment to push forward on several fronts. The company is launching a new partnership with EdMusica, extending its reach into music education with a particular focus on the LatAm region. Notey is also partnering with symphony orchestras such as the Slovenian Philharmonic to deepen young people's connection to music and their musical understanding.

In the Balkans, Notey is partnering with Telemach, the United Group operator that provides mobile, broadband, and pay-TV services to households in Slovenia, Croatia, and the wider region. The partnership makes Telemach a new sales channel for Notey, putting the platform in front of families through a provider they already rely on every day and giving Notey a direct route to consumers across the region without having to build that reach market by market.

Notey's AI-native WorldBuilder is preparing for a public launch. WorldBuilder lets users create their own game worlds and music-learning experiences using generative AI, built around an adaptive curriculum. It's an important next step in the platform's evolution, from a gamified experience to a content creation marketplace.

The company is also broadening its instrument support. Piano, voice, and recorder experiences are targeted for release by Q1 2027, expanding both Notey's addressable market and the ways students and musicians can engage with the platform.

Growing the Team, in Europe and the United States

Headcount grows with the round. Notey is expanding its team across engineering, product and design, content and curriculum, and school partnerships, hiring both into the Malta office and across the company's United States operation.

Notey is a company of music enthusiasts first. Its team is made up of performers, teachers, game designers, and engineers who wanted practice to feel like something people choose rather than something they are told to do.

What's Next

With the seed round closed and the Malta Enterprise grant in place, Notey's priorities are clear. The company will deepen engagement, expand instrument coverage, grow its school footprint in the United States and the EU, use generative AI to significantly increase the breadth of content available on the platform, and build out its teams in Malta and the United States to support it.

The People Building It

Notey is led by a founding team that sits at the intersection of performance, engineering, and education, joined this year by one of edtech's more experienced operators.

Dr. Mak Grgić, CEO and Co-Founder. A four-time Grammy-nominated classical guitarist and recording artist, Mak performs internationally as a soloist and chamber musician and served as Assistant Professor of Guitar at the University of South Carolina School of Music. He completed doctoral studies in arts leadership at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he was the first guitarist admitted to the Artist Diploma program, and he has commissioned new work from composers including Michael Gordon, Michael Abels, and Julia Adolphe. He founded the Virtual Guitar Orchestra, which has connected more than 6,000 guitarists across 50 countries and was honored by the Library of Congress. Notey grew out of the distance he kept seeing between the practice room and the reasons people pick up an instrument in the first place.

Adithya Bellathur, CTO and Co-Founder. A machine learning engineer and former researcher working in artificial intelligence and robotics, Adithya came to Notey from Bloomberg, and earlier Amazon, and has research experience in reinforcement learning, computer vision, and audio machine learning, which has been used by companies like DeepMind and Microsoft. He leads engineering and the machine learning that underpins Notey gameplay, and he heads development of the GenAI WorldBuilder now preparing for public launch. He is also a musician and artist, which is not incidental to how the product gets built.

Yishai Pinchover, Chief Strategy Officer. Yishai co-founded CodeMonkey, the game-based coding platform that taught Python and other languages to children in classrooms across Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, India, and beyond, and which was acquired by TAL Education Group in 2018. Since then he has worked as an edtech investor and advisor, including advisory board roles with companies building AI-driven learning products. He is an avid musician and joined Notey because the thesis that made CodeMonkey work, that children will do difficult things for a long time if the doing is genuinely fun, applies just as cleanly to music.

"We are competing with everything else on a kid's screen, and attention is measured in seconds," said Dr. Mak Grgić, CEO and co-founder of Notey. "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."

About Notey

Notey turns music practice into play. The platform pairs game design with an adaptive curriculum so that students build real skill through play, while teachers keep visibility into what their students are doing between lessons. A Techstars 2023 company and recipient of an InnoVision Award for Education and Technology, Notey has grown to more than 100,000 consumer users and is active in 60 schools across four school districts, with operations in New York City, Columbia, South Carolina, and Valletta, Malta. Learn more at notey.co.