They were grocery delivery rivals. Now they're teaming up to build an Nvidia-backed 'Cursor for math.'

• Former rivals who ran competing grocery delivery startups founded the math AI startup Corca.
• Nvidia invested in Corca’s $7.8 million seed round through its NVentures venture capital arm.
• Corca builds a collaborative workspace for writing, solving, and sharing math equations.

Although they had been competitors, Gladkoborodov and Shevlyagin barely knew each other until after their respective businesses shut down. Living a few blocks apart in Brooklyn, they began meeting to discuss physics — a subject both had studied independently — and eventually became frustrated by how difficult it was to share mathematical equations digitally.

They explored launching another grocery-delivery company before pivoting to math software, and they cofounded Corca in 2023.

Shevlyagin says existing math tools like MATLAB and LaTeX are outdated and rely on complex formatting languages, so teams have to switch between products or share equations via handwritten notes.

“It’s like one of those sleeping categories where nothing’s going on for more than 30 years,” he told Business Insider.

Corca, which has 12 employees, says it has attracted more than 10,000 users and plans to use the seed funding to develop its product and expand its engineering team. Its core product will remain free while it develops paid AI and computational features planned for later this year.

Corca sees engineers, researchers, and other technical professionals as its primary market, particularly in fields like AI and finance.

Gladkoborodov said Nvidia’s interest likely stemmed from the startup’s focus on the math that underpins those industries.

“We see ourselves as infrastructure for mathematical work,” Gladkoborodov said. “Whether the application is AI research, engineering, robotics, finance, or scientific computing, people still need a way to create, compute, and collaborate around mathematical models.”