Research infrastructure & publishing · Scientific communication
Curvenote
A Calgary company building the authoring and publishing tools behind MyST Markdown, the open document engine now stewarded as a Jupyter sub-project. Backed by Y Combinator, it has moved from a command line tool for individual authors to infrastructure used by a scientific society and the operator of bioRxiv and medRxiv.
Two questions at a conference booth
At AGU23, the American Geophysical Union’s 2023 annual meeting in San Francisco, staff from Curvenote stopped strangers walking through the Open Science Pavilion and asked two questions: do you use Jupyter notebooks, and would you like to submit one and get a peer reviewed publication out of it. By the company’s own account, over 90 percent said yes to the first question. Of those, every single person said yes to the second. The runner up answer to the first question, the company wrote afterward, was “No, I just pick up rocks!”
The exchange captures the pitch. Scientists increasingly do their work in computational notebooks, files that mix code, data and narrative text. When it comes time to publish, that work is flattened into a static PDF, stripped of the code and data that made it reproducible in the first place.
The gap between working and publishing
Curvenote’s own account of its founding describes a researcher who worked in dynamic notebooks but had to publish static PDFs, cutting out the code and data that made the work reproducible. That gap, between how science is done and how it is written up, is the problem the company says it exists to close.
The company is a core contributor to MyST Markdown (Markedly Structured Text), a markup language built on standard Markdown that is designed for publication quality documents, books and websites written from computational content. Development of the underlying document engine, mystmd, began as the Curvenote CLI, released under the MIT license, and was later transferred to the ExecutableBooks team. According to mystmd’s own documentation, the engine is now developed as a collaboration between Curvenote, the education nonprofit 2i2c, and the ExecutableBooks team, and in June 2024 Jupyter Book was incorporated as a Jupyter sub-project that standardized on mystmd.
Founders
Rowan Cockett, CEO, started building geoscience visualization software as an undergraduate at the University of Calgary. He co-founded 3point Science in 2013 while a PhD student in geophysics at the University of British Columbia; that company was acquired by Seequent, formerly Aranz Geo, in March 2016. Cockett stayed on to open Seequent’s Calgary office and ran the company’s cloud platform team for four years as VP of Cloud Architecture, reporting to the CEO. Seequent sold in 2021 for $1.05 billion, by Cockett’s own account. He finished his PhD in 2017 with research on a numerical framework for quantitative communication in the geosciences.
Steve Purves, CTO, is described on Curvenote’s Y Combinator page as an engineer with more than 20 years of industry experience, with technical background in computer vision, data science and machine learning. He founded a consultancy in 2013 leading distributed technical teams across energy, healthcare, finance and electronic manufacturing. Cockett and Purves founded Curvenote in 2019.
From CLI to a society and a preprint server
Curvenote joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch. Its original YC application described the goal as a platform for “writing, sharing and re-using scientific content,” built around small, reusable content blocks tied to their computational origins. In June 2023, the American Geophysical Union entered a partnership with Curvenote to build the Notebooks Now! pilot, a workflow letting computational notebooks be submitted, peer reviewed and published as a primary article format, with hosting for up to 20 published notebooks on an AGU branded domain. By December 2023, AGU’s journal Earth and Space Science had opened to notebook based submissions for 2024.
The company raised a CAD $1.4 million seed round, announced July 2, 2025, described as coming from a network of angel investors focused on scientific infrastructure and open technology, alongside researchers and founders, on top of its existing Y Combinator backing. In June 2026, openRxiv, the nonprofit that runs the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv, launched Curvenote Reader as the first experiment in its new openRxiv Labs program, an interactive reading interface tested against a corpus openRxiv describes as more than 350,000 preprints.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Company basics | Y Combinator lists Curvenote as founded in 2019, part of the Winter 2021 batch, based in Calgary, with a team size of 3 as recorded on its profile. | Public record |
| Founder background | Rowan Cockett co-founded 3point Science in 2013, acquired by Seequent (formerly Aranz Geo) in March 2016; Seequent sold in 2021 for a reported $1.05 billion. Details are from Cockett’s own personal site, not independently audited. | Self-stated |
| mystmd governance | Developed as a collaboration between Curvenote, 2i2c and the ExecutableBooks team. Originally released by Curvenote as the Curvenote CLI, later transferred to ExecutableBooks. Jupyter Book was incorporated as a Jupyter sub-project standardizing on mystmd in June 2024. | Public record |
| Sloan Foundation grant | mystmd’s documentation credits a Sloan Foundation grant (#9231) for building and promoting MyST as a path to next generation scientific publishing. The grant is documented as going to the ExecutableBooks team, not to Curvenote the company directly. | Public record |
| AGU partnership | AGU’s own site describes a June 2023 partnership with Curvenote to build the Notebooks Now! submission and hosting pilot, integrated with AGU’s peer review system, hosting up to 20 published notebooks. Earth and Space Science opened to notebook submissions in 2024. | Partner-stated |
| openRxiv partnership | openRxiv (bioRxiv, medRxiv) describes launching Curvenote Reader in June 2026 as the first experiment in its new openRxiv Labs program, tested against a corpus it describes as more than 350,000 preprints. Curvenote says it has translated and deployed over 500,000 article versions with openRxiv to date, a figure not independently verified. | Partner-stated |
| Peer-reviewed methods paper | “Continuous Tools for Scientific Publishing,” authored by Cockett, Purves, Franklin Koch and Mike Morrison, appeared in the Proceedings of the 23rd Python in Science Conference (SciPy 2024), describing MyST Markdown and Curvenote’s publishing tools and case studies. | Peer reviewed |
| Revenue and funding, third party estimate | GetLatka estimates Curvenote reached $440,000 in revenue in 2025 and lists funding as $0 and team size as 4 employees as of December 2024. The $0 funding figure conflicts with the company’s own July 2025 announcement of a CAD $1.4 million seed round. | Differs from company statement |
| SEC Form D | No Form D filing under Curvenote’s name was found in SEC EDGAR full text search as of September 25, 2026, consistent with a Canadian company whose disclosed seed round was reported in Canadian dollars. | Not found |
| FDA, NIH, NSF, PubMed records | No FDA clearances, NIH awards, NSF awards or PubMed listed publications under the company’s name were found. Curvenote is a software and publishing company, not a device or drug developer. | Not found |
Read plainly: Curvenote’s technical claim, that mystmd is real, widely used open infrastructure now governed as a Jupyter sub-project, holds up against independent documentation. Its commercial claim, that this infrastructure supports a viable business, rests mostly on two named institutional relationships, AGU and openRxiv, plus an unverified third party revenue estimate that does not agree with the company’s own funding announcement. No SEC filing, court record or audited financial statement was found to settle the difference.
What to watch
- Whether AGU’s Notebooks Now! pilot, aimed at up to 20 notebooks, expands into a standing part of Earth and Space Science’s submission process.
- Published results or engagement metrics from the Curvenote Reader experiment inside openRxiv Labs, which openRxiv says it will assess using time on page, engagement and author feedback.
- Named, paying institutional customers beyond AGU and openRxiv.
- Any SEC or other regulatory filing that would independently confirm the size of the July 2025 seed round.
In their words
“Science is built in pieces like models, data, methods, protocols, code, but it’s still communicated in static formats.”
Rowan Cockett, CEO and co-founder, July 2025 seed round release · Company release
“We’re building tools that reflect how research really works: modular, interactive, and reusable.”
Rowan Cockett, CEO and co-founder, July 2025 seed round release · Company release
“We see ourselves as part of a broader movement to make scientific communication more open, flexible, and interoperable.”
Steve Purves, CTO and co-founder, July 2025 seed round release · Company release
“Contributing to shared infrastructure like MyST is essential to that future.”
Steve Purves, CTO and co-founder, July 2025 seed round release · Company release
“Selling my first company, building & leading global teams, and creating beautifully designed, technically outstanding products was a fantastic experience.”
Rowan Cockett, on the Seequent acquisition, personal site · Self-published bio
“iooxa is connecting the building blocks that make up documents and presentations to their computational origins, so that they can remain linked and interactive.”
From Curvenote’s original YC application, published on its Y Combinator profile · Public record
“We are thrilled to partner with Curvenote, an organization that shares our commitment to open science and aligns with our Labs partner criteria on this first experiment.”
Tracy Teal, openRxiv, June 2026 · Partner announcement
“We have translated and deployed over 500k article versions with openRxiv to date.”
Mike Morrison, Curvenote, FORCE11 2026 recap on the company blog · Company blog
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordCurvenote company profile
- CompanyAbout Curvenote: Rethinking Scientific Publishing
- CompanyCurvenote Raises $1.4M Seed Round to Power the Future of Modular Scientific Communication
- EstimateCurvenote Revenue 2025: $440K Est. ARR
- PartnerNotebooks Now! Enters Pilot Phase
- CompanyPublishing Computational Notebooks at AGU23
- Public recordHistory and background, MyST Markdown documentation
- Peer reviewedContinuous Tools for Scientific Publishing
- Self-published bioRowan’s Story
- Self-published bioCurriculum Vitae, Rowan Cockett
- PartnerLaunching openRxiv Labs
- PartnerTry our first openRxiv Labs experiment: a new interactive reading experience with Curvenote Reader
- CompanyOpenRxiv & Curvenote’s new Reader launch took to the stage at FORCE11 2026
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
