Investing in Corca: The IDE for Mathematics

Somewhere in the world, a physicist is photographing a whiteboard.

An equation they spent hours deriving will survive as a JPEG in the photos app where it will be uneditable and disconnected from the rest of their work and tools. It’s not the most elegant solution but it’s what most researchers and students have relied on for decades.

This is a strange gap in the modern tech stack where powerful tools with elegant UX are ubiquitous across writing, coding, design, data analysis, and more. Most knowledge is easily digitized and collaborated on – and increasingly used as context for AI. Mathematics is an exception.

Mathematics – the universal language at the frontier of physics, engineering, economics, and AI research itself still lives largely on paper and whiteboards. The primary tools available to its practitioners are either four decades old and built for typesetting mathematics (not for research and computation) or are horizontal LLMs which can’t operate directly on mathematical symbols themselves and fail to invoke the correct code to solve problems that don’t resemble training data. Even today, when researchers want to explore a new idea they default to analog.

Corca is building the AI workspace for mathematics. Instead of treating equations as static text, Corca makes them live, executable objects that can be edited, linked, and transformed across an entire workspace. Agents are natively built into this symbolic foundation, allowing Corca to reason over mathematical structures (not just text) and perform formal manipulations that traditional language models cannot. What Cursor and Claude Code are for software, Corca is building this for math; the first end-to-end IDE for mathematics with AI at the core.

Corca's founders, Anton Gladkoborodov and Oleg Shevlyagin, came to this problem as many of the best do – with fresh eyes on a problem that others didn’t question. Both founders previously built companies in the grocery delivery space, and after exiting his business Anton began teaching himself advanced physics in his spare time (who does that!?). Working with Oleg, who has a degree in Physics, the pair soon realized the major pain points of trying to write math digitally. And so, they set out to build Corca to solve their problem.

At NEA, we look for platforms that extend what is possible at the frontier of human knowledge. The best AI tools unlock entirely new ways of thinking and building across coding, creativity, GTM, legal, and more. Corca is bringing this same unbounded frontier to mathematics.

Across legacy industries and frontier AI, applied math has enormous demand and potential. Corca is designed to address this opportunity; every new foundation model trained on physics, engineering, or scientific data is further evidence of the problem Corca aims to solve. . The workspace for math has always been a missing layer.

We’re thrilled to welcome Corca to the NEA portfolio and co-lead their $7.8M seed round alongside Nventures with participation from Daft Capital and Bloomberg Beta. And Corca is hiring! Check here for open roles.