The startup credits a mixture of factors including mobile adoption, user recommendations and product enhancements for its huge bump in members.
"Mainly, though, there's been growth in the general awareness that you can actually affect the performance of your brain," says co-founder and Chief Science Officer Mike Scanlan.
Lumosity, which collaborates with universities like Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and Columbia, originally launched in 2007 as a web-based brain training service. It has since released mobile applications for iPhone, Android and webOS that have, in total, been downloaded more than 6 million times and are clearly helping fuel new growth.
The ever-expanding size of Lumosity's member base lends it to possessing the largest database of human cognition, according to Scanlan. The startup has access to more than 200 million game results and can analyze that data to better understand how the human brain works and iterate its games accordingly. "We can dig through the database to get a better understanding of how people can improve their cognitive performance," says Scanlan.
Last year, Lumosity quietly acquired social gaming company ShuffleBrain, whose first title, Photograb, transforms Facebook photos into various puzzles. The acquisition was talent-centric and ShuffleBrain co-founders Amy Jo Kim and Scott Kim -- experts in social architecture and puzzle design -- now serve as advisors to the company.
Lumosity appears to be on the right track in the user acquisition department, but little is known about its financial well-being, and Scanlan would not disclose revenue figures or paid subscriber numbers. He did, however, point to the fact that the startup has not needed to raise money, beyond the $3 million in funding it last closed in 2008, as a sign of its health.