Turning Math into a Sport
MathDash is an online live math-competition platform that gets students addicted to learning. Our target audience already spends thousands of hours doing math questions competitively, and we've *already* gotten the best of the best to switch to doing problems on our site - an average of 65 minutes a day among our 200 most active users, and a total of over 150,000 arithmetic questions solved in just the last week! Why? Because it is more thrilling and exciting to compete live, see yourself on a leaderboard, and improve your 'ELO' rating. We are USA Math Olympians, and have been the top power users on every single product marketed towards competitive math learners. What's missing is the math game that allows anyone at any level to play with math on demand and compete live at their level, whether it's in the back of an Uber or while training for a math competition.
Active Founders
Daniel Sun
Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of MathDash. He was a math competition champion in high school, qualifying for the Math Olympiad Summer Program, which opened doors to MIT and Jane Street. In addition to competing, he coached his middle school MathCounts team to a regional championship and created the nationwide Collegiate Series of Poker. Daniel is now creating MathDash to build the online competitive math scene to get students addicted to learning.
Akshaj Kadaveru
Akshaj is the co-founder and CTO of MathDash. He is a former serial math competition participant (two-time top-12 finisher in the ESPN nationally broadcasted MATHCOUNTS Countdown Round) who spent thousands of hours of his childhood playing an online math game. He studied CS at MIT, and built (with Daniel) a MIT class comparison site with 2000 users, a guess-the-song game with 6000 players, and worked at Gather, Jump Trading, and Wormhole Labs as a software engineer.
Company Launches
Hi everyone! We’re Daniel and Akshaj. We met 14 years ago playing an online math game and are co-founders of MathDash.
From left to right:
Daniel: 3x USA Math Olympiad and 1x Math Olympiad Training Program. Computer Science @ MIT, Trading at Jane Street, SWE at Kalshi and Scale AI.
Akshaj: 7x USA Math Olympiad and 2x Math Olympiad Training Program. Computer Science @ MIT, with Trading & SWE experiences at Jump Trading, Wormhole, Jane Street, and Gather.
Competition Math - the best way to learn math
Competition math involves solving challenging and creative problems within a competitive setting, covering topics beyond standard school curricula. This format sends competitors to the frontiers of math and science by encouraging innovative thinking, fostering a community, and promoting a love for math.
Founders of Scale AI, Perplexity AI, and Cognition AI all started their journeys as competitive learners, and picked up the problem solving skills they would eventually need by doing these competitions.
This is why 300,000 high schoolers take the American Math Competitions annually, and elite universities recruit high performers. In fact, competitive math and programming are the primary skills tested in trading and software job interviews!
Daniel’s middle school math team: college and grad school/first job
Competitive Learning hasn't reached most Humans
Humans want to learn, and humans are competitive. Why, then, do most not enter competitive learning circuits? We talked to parents, teachers, coaches, and students, and they told us:
- “The problems are too hard”
- “The barrier to entry is too high”
- “What if I look stupid”
- "I'm too busy"
MathDash makes Competitive Math accessible for everyone
- Problem difficulty ranges from addition all the way to advanced theory
- MathDash only requires a device with an internet connection
- You compete against others at your level, and your main goal is to improve your rating
- The contests happen every day, and you can play an arena match live instantly at any time! Total time for a match is 2 minutes.
We already have 200 of the best competitive mathletes participating in our tournaments, and our users have solved over 400,000 arithmetic questions - one even played in our Arena for 10 hours straight!
Competitive Learning is already a growing community despite the significant barriers preventing most from participating. Having been addicted to competitive learning and educational games when we were young, we are the best positioned team to unlock the power of competitive learning for all.
Asks
Share MathDash with any math teachers, coaches, or students you know! We would love intros to any teachers or coaches as well.
If you are feeling ambitious, our next big synchronous contest is Monday, March 18 at 4:30pm PDT.
YC Sign Photo
Hear from the founders
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
We met online in 2011 because we were two of the biggest players in an online math racing game. After spending a thousands of hours competing on the site, we met in person at the Math Olympiad Summer Program and then at MIT.At MIT, we learned to build webapps and were head instructors in the official undergraduate web development course. We launched an app that over half the MIT undergrad population used, and realized that we love building and impacting people’s lives.We realized that people care a lot about getting better at math, and math competitions are extremely fun, but there is no good way to do math. MathDash is the best way to compete in math and have fun while doing so.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
MathDash is going to be a viral e-sport that people all around the world compete in on a daily basis. Just like how people run to improve their physical fitness, people will do MathDash to improve their mental fitness. People will see math not as a niche nerd activity, but a legitimate mainstream esport. And it will be fun.