Curvenote

What Curvenote does

Curvenote Inc. is a Calgary-based, privately-held software company that builds a Scientific Content Management System (SCMS) for organizing, writing, and publishing computational research. Founded in 2019 by Dr. Rowan Cockett (CEO) and Steve Purves (CTO), the platform treats scientific outputs (figures, equations, datasets, code, prose) as modular, version-controlled components that retain source history, metadata, and attribution from notebook through to publication. Curvenote's product suite consists of three core offerings: the Curvenote Editor for collaborative scientific writing with deep Jupyter integration and multi-format export (PDF, LaTeX, Word, Typst, MyST Markdown); the Curvenote SCMS, launched September 2025 as the institutional connective layer over research-to-publication workflows; and the Curvenote Reader, which transforms static articles into web-native, interactive reading experiences with hover citations and zoomable figures.

The company's underlying technology is built on MyST Markdown — an open-source authoring format originally developed by Curvenote and now an official Project Jupyter initiative — and integrates with 20+ ecosystem tools including ORCID, Crossref, Jupyter, GitHub, Zotero, Typst, JATS, and CRediT Roles. Curvenote serves three primary segments: individual researchers (Free, Pro at $9/month, Lab at $15/month per user), research labs and teams using the collaborative Editor, and scientific publishers, journals, and preprint repositories using the SCMS for institutional publishing infrastructure. Enterprise customers include the American Geophysical Union (Notebooks Now! initiative), the Microscopy Society of America (Elemental Microscopy journal), the Physiome Project, openRxiv/bioRxiv, and SciPy Proceedings, with Curvenote Reader deployed across more than 500,000 openRxiv preprints.

Curvenote monetizes through a hybrid model: a freemium, product-led growth motion on the Editor (self-serve signup with conversion to paid tiers), combined with quote-based annual enterprise subscriptions for the SCMS covering implementation and ongoing Reader deployments. The company was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2021 cohort and Creative Destruction Lab, and has raised a $1.4M seed round; revenue is not publicly disclosed. With 1-10 employees, the company operates a remote-first team across North America and internationally, anchored by founder leadership in the JupyterBook/MyST Markdown steering council and the open science community.

Name

Curvenote

Legal name

Curvenote Inc.

Website

https://curvenote.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2019

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Curvenote builds a Scientific Content Management System (SCMS) and collaborative Editor that organizes computational research into modular, version-controlled components for publication. It serves individual researchers, labs, and scientific publishers with integrations across the Jupyter ecosystem.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Scientific Content Management / Scholarly Publishing Software

NAICS

Custom Computer Programming Services (541511)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

Regulatory Information Management (RIM) & Submission Publishing Software (HLAGAJAL)

Keywords

• Scientific publishing software
• Research collaboration platform
• Scientific content management
• Academic writing tools
• Scholarly publishing infrastructure

Headquarters

HQ city

Calgary

HQ country

Canada

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B and B2C

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Subscription SaaS (Individual Plans): Tiered subscription model for individual researchers and scientists: Free Individual plan with basic features, Pro plan at $9/month for professionals, and Lab plan at $15/month per user for teams. Revenue generated through monthly or annual subscription billing.
2. SCMS Enterprise/Institutional Subscriptions: Annual subscription for institutions, publishers, and journals using the Scientific Content Management System. One annual fee covers content management without per-article cost increases. Includes implementation project fee plus ongoing annual subscription for Curvenote Reader deployments.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion4 records

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels9 records

Core offering

Curvenote provides a Scientific Content Management System (SCMS), a web-based Curvenote Reader, and a collaborative Curvenote Editor that together organize research into modular, reusable components with persistent metadata, version history, and attribution. The platform supports real-time co-authoring, deep Jupyter integration, LaTeX editing, and export to multiple journal templates (PDF, Word, LaTeX, Typst, JATS/XML). It is sold via individual/self-serve subscriptions and annual enterprise contracts with publishers, journals, and research institutions.

Product overview

Curvenote offers a unified platform for scientific communication consisting of three core products: Curvenote SCMS (Scientific Content Management System) for organizing research into connected, reusable components; Curvenote Reader for web-native reading experiences; and Curvenote Editor for collaborative scientific writing with Jupyter integration. The platform includes a library of professional templates supporting multiple journal formats (AGU, arXiv, Springer, MDPI, etc.) and enables export to PDF, Word, LaTeX, and Typst. Curvenote SCMS serves as the connective layer that tracks source history, metadata, and attribution across the research lifecycle from notebooks through publication.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Curvenote SCMS: Scientific Content Management System that organizes research into modular components built to work across any project.
• Curvenote Reader
• Curvenote Editor
• Curvenote Pro
• Curvenote Teams

Products and services

• Curvenote SCMS (Scientific Content Management System) Scientific Content Management System that organizes research into modular, reusable components with persistent metadata, version history, and attribution. Serves institutions, scientific societies, journal publishers, and preprint repositories as their core publishing infrastructure for interactive, web-native articles, with quote-based annual enterprise contracts.
• Curvenote Reader Web-based scientific article reader that converts static papers and existing XML/JATS articles into connected, web-native reading experiences with inline citations, zoomable figures, expandable figures, and a metadata overlay. Sold to publishers and preprint repositories as an enterprise product.
• Curvenote Editor Collaborative web-based writing tool for science that enables real-time co-authoring of narrative, code, equations, figures, and references with Jupyter integration, LaTeX support, version control, citation management, and export to PDF, Word, LaTeX, Typst, MyST, and Jupyter Book templates. Sold via self-serve freemium tiers (Free, Pro $9/mo, Lab $15/mo per user) to individual researchers and teams.

Quantifiable outcome

• Over 13,000 public books created using MyST Markdown and Jupyter Book tools
• +3 more outcomes

Named customers5 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration18 records

Feature10 records

Partnerships

Eight partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.

• NumFocuscoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 July 2024Partnership with NumFocus supporting SciPy 2024 conference and proceedings. Curvenote hosts the Scientific Python Proceedings with automated submission systems, GitHub integrations, structural checks, and web-native interactive reading experience. NumFocus is the nonprofit organization supporting open-source scientific computing.
• openRxivcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Curvenote Reader deployed across 500,000+ openRxiv preprints (bioRxiv). The partnership brings inline citations, zoomable figures, and connected context to preprint reading without disrupting existing workflows. openRxiv is incubated by Neuromatch.
• American Geophysical Union (AGU)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 June 2023Partnership to implement Notebooks Now! initiative. AGU's Earth and Space Science journal accepts computational notebooks as submission format starting 2024. Curvenote provides tooling and infrastructure for notebook-based article submission, peer review, and publication with integrated Jupyter environments.
• Physiome ProjectcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 19 April 2023Launched first scientific journal on Curvenote infrastructure. The open-access journal focuses on mathematical models of physiological processes, promoting reproducibility and open science. Uses Curvenote's infrastructure for publishing with web-based articles, structured data, and interactive features.
• FORCE11coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 16 November 2021Gold sponsorship of FORCE11 2021 conference. FORCE11 is a global community working to advance open science and scholarship. Partnership supports FORCE11's efforts on reproducibility, open data, and open access publishing. Curvenote continues as sponsor at FORCE11 2024 and 2026.
• Project JupytercoreTechnology or IntegrationMyST Markdown, developed in part by Curvenote, became an official Jupyter initiative on June 27, 2024. Curvenote originally developed the CLI before upstreaming to community governance. Jupyter Book will be transitioned to build on mystmd engine. Project enables web-based scientific publishing from Jupyter notebooks.
• Microscopy Society of AmericacoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerLaunched Elemental Microscopy, a new interactive open-access journal that connects high-resolution imagery, code, and data into interactive articles. Provides MSA full editorial control with no author fees.
• Scholar NexusminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerStrategic partnership initially incubated by Neuromatch, aimed at transforming scholarly publishing by embracing open science principles, reproducibility, and exceptional user experience.

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Overleaf: Overleaf is the dominant collaborative LaTeX editor for scientific and technical writing, serving researchers and institutions with similar collaborative authoring and journal-template export use cases as Curvenote Editor. Both target the same primary persona — academic researchers writing papers — with comparable PLG-plus-enterprise GTM.
• Authorea: Authorea is a collaborative writing platform built specifically for scientific papers, offering version control, rich-media embedding, and direct journal submission. It overlaps directly with Curvenote Editor on the individual-researcher-to-paper use case and competes for the same journal partnerships.
• Quarto (Posit): Quarto is Posit's open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc, supporting notebooks (Jupyter, R, Observable) and multi-format output (PDF, HTML, Word). It directly competes with MyST Markdown / Jupyter Book in the open scientific authoring stack and overlaps with Curvenote's SCMS for institutional use.

Emerging players

• Jupyter Book: Jupyter Book is the open-source sibling of MyST Markdown in the Jupyter ecosystem, used to build publication-quality books and documents from computational content. With Curvenote's MyST now an official Jupyter initiative and Jupyter Book slated to migrate onto mystmd, the two are tightly coupled open-source counterparts serving the same authoring community.
• Stencila: Stencila provides an interactive, reproducible document format and editor aimed at scientific publishing from computational notebooks. It overlaps with Curvenote Editor on the interactive-article and executable-publication use cases for researchers.
• Manubot: Manubot is an open-source tool for automating manuscript generation from scientific sources using Git and Markdown. It overlaps with Curvenote Editor on the Markdown-based reproducible manuscript use case for technical and life-science researchers.

Broad incumbents

• Atypon: Atypon (a Wiley subsidiary) is a major scholarly publishing platform serving thousands of journals with content hosting, analytics, and workflow tools. It competes with Curvenote SCMS for the institutional publisher infrastructure layer and has deeper enterprise sales reach and balance sheet.
• Silverchair: Silverchair is an established platform provider for scientific and scholarly publishers, offering content hosting, workflow, and analytics across STM societies and journals. It competes with Curvenote SCMS in the publisher-infrastructure segment with a much larger installed base.
• F1000Research: F1000Research is an open-research publishing platform with post-publication peer review and integrated data/code hosting. It overlaps with Curvenote SCMS and Reader on the open-science publishing and interactive-article experience for scientific societies.

Others

• Zotero: Zotero is the dominant open-source reference management tool integrated into Curvenote's citation workflow. While not a direct competitor, it sits in the same researcher toolchain and is one of Curvenote's supported integrations, making it an adjacent ecosystem peer.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/curvenote
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/iooxa

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors2 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Curvenote