NumWorks : a success story like no other

NumWorks is a hardware company that markets a next-generation graphing calculator, disrupting an old and oligopolistic market. Let’s take a look back at NumWorks’ impressive 6-year journey before its acquisition by Aldebaran Capital Partners.

From the encounter to the investment

In late 2015, Romain Goyet and Jean-Patrice Anciaux, back then investor at Bpifrance Digital Venture, met each other.

At that time, apart from the deck he had sent us, all we knew about Romain was his impressive resume as a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique, a former Apple engineer who had worked on the iPhone’s Mail application, and the founder of a mobile application development agency (Applidium, later sold to Fabernovel).

This impressive background indicated his strong expertise when it comes to user experience and ergonomics. What stood out in his initial pitch was the focus on designing a graphing calculator for high school students that offered a new value proposition to disrupt the market. His vision was to offer a sleek calculator that was more advanced than the existing ones on the market and that operated on an open-source basis.

Romain drew a convincing parallel between the graphing calculator market and the mobile phone market, noting that unlike mobile phones, graphing calculators had not seen any major innovations in the past 20 years in terms of features (such as power, touchscreen, multimedia, connectivity, etc.) and design (such as touchscreen smartphones). He saw this as a real anomaly explained by the oligopolistic nature of the market, where Casio and Texas Instruments were dominant players.

Investing in a hardware project in the education sector was an ambitious bet for a VC fund in 2016. Romain was a solo founder with no product nor team, but we were won over by his vision.

Finally, we led a pre-seed funding round with the F3A, Bpifrance Digital Venture’s first seed fund, alongside Kima Venture and Business Angels in mid-2016.

According to Romain, the investment from the F3A fund was crucial and allowed him “to contribute to improving the teaching of scientific subjects in France and creating employment.”

As a Board Member from the start, Digital Venture was a privileged witness and participant in this adventure.

Over the past six years, Romain Goyet and NumWorks have faced numerous challenges and demonstrated remarkable efficiency, defying common misconceptions about hardware projects.

From idea to industrialization

To achieve its product-market fit, NumWorks developed its calculator with a user-centered design process in collaboration with several mathematics teachers.

After less than 18 months of development, the first batch was launched at the start of the 2018 academic year. The strategy was to offer (at t=0) a technology that broke away from existing products (which were powerful but very complex to use), giving priority to ergonomics and design in the first instance.

With a core team of 5 people, they faced numerous challenges during the launch:

• The choice of components required meticulous qualification.
• Finding and convincing suitable suppliers to start a production line required a lot of effort.
• Dealing with compliance issues (e.g., lithium battery) was a new experience for them.
• Planning the logistics of product delivery from the factory to customers’ homes to ensure smooth and timely delivery.

To tackle these challenges, the support of Frederic Potter, an early stage business angel and successful entrepreneur (Cirpack, Netatmo) was crucial.

The combination of these efforts allowed NumWorks to overcome these challenges and to successfully make the transition from an idea on PowerPoint to an innovative calculator.

Searching for product-market fit

NumWorks subsequently created a real community of users. By putting themselves in the shoes of teachers and providing them easy access to a calculator, the teams were able to quickly understand their needs and incorporate them into subsequent updates (e.g., the ability to interactively visualize a tangent in a function plot).

NumWorks’ product engineers always spent more than 50% of their time in contact with teachers. Thus, a major reason for this success is that they placed the 35,000 high school maths teachers at the core of the product, as well as their go-to-market strategy.

A go-to-market strategy built on a strong community

NumWorks initially sold its calculator online, allowing them to maintain a direct connection with their customers. They chose to rely on the teaching community, which acted as ambassadors and advocates to their students.

The growth and increasing popularity of the NumWorks calculator enabled it to be present in 5 different countries (Europe and North America) before making its way onto the shelves of major retailers.*

Aldebaran Capital Partners’ acquisition : A new chapter begins

Romain was able to assemble an exceptional team (around twenty employees in 2023) that allowed him to tick all the boxes for a successful project. By raising funds only once, NumWorks has been a model of efficiency throughout these 6 years of adventure.

At the beginning of this year 2023, contacts were made between NumWorks and Aldebaran Capital Partners. The management and board believed that this alliance would enable NumWorks to become a major international player in educational solutions for the learning of scientific subjects. With the infusion of financial, operational, and strategic resources, Aldebaran will support NumWorks in its international expansion and the development of its offerings, whether in hardware or software form.

We are proud of the trajectory of NumWorks, Romain Goyet, and his teams, and we congratulate them on the immense success they have built.

Best of luck and see you soon,

The Digital Venture Team