Project Numina

French non-profit building open AI-for-math — NuminaMath dataset, Kimina-Prover, and Numina-Lean-Agent for formal theorem proving.

1. Core Product / Service

Project Numina is a French non-profit and open scientific collaboration dedicated to advancing mathematical AI, releasing all research publicly under a public-benefit mandate [1]. Its output splits into three layers:

• Datasets — NuminaMath, the largest public corpus of mathematical problems and proofs (~860,000 entries), plus NuminaMath Lean 100k and CombiBench; the roadmap targets formalizing up to 1 million problems/proofs [1].
• Models — NuminaMath 7B, which won the AIMO Progress Prize #1 in July 2024, and the Kimina-Prover line, developed jointly with Moonshot AI's kimi team [1].
• Agents — Numina-Lean-Agent, an open agentic reasoning system for formal mathematics (Lean), which solved all 12 problems of the 2025 Putnam competition and formalized the Brascamp–Lieb theorem [1][3].

Jimmy's 2026-09-28 note frames Numina's strategic fork as self-trained proof models vs. public-compute infrastructure — an open, grant-funded path rather than a closed lab or VC bet [1].

2. Target Users & Pain Points

• Research mathematicians and formal-methods community needing open, reproducible theorem-proving tooling.
• Olympiad / competitive-math educators — NuminaMath and the fellowship explicitly target educational accessibility.

Pain solved: formal proof is expensive to produce and verify; Numina's open datasets and models lower the cost of entry and avoid locking math verification behind a proprietary API.

3. Competitive Landscape

Numina's differentiation is openness and non-profit governance versus DeepMind's closed frontier and axiom's commercial "Verified AI" push.

4. Unique Observations

• The "Kimina" name encodes the alliance. Kimina-Prover is the Numina × Moonshot (kimi) joint prover — Jimmy's 2026-09-28 notes trace the collaboration timeline between Numina and both Kimi (Kimi-Prover) and ByteDance Seed (Kakeya), an unusual cross-lab, cross-border open-math coalition [1].
• Grant economics over VC economics. Funded by an €3M XTX Markets research grant rather than venture rounds, Numina is structurally insulated from the benchmark-hype incentives that drive axiom-style startups — a genuinely different answer to "who funds formal math AI" [1].
• Formal verification as public good. By open-sourcing datasets and agents, Numina bets that math verification is infrastructure, not a moat — the opposite thesis of closed "Verified AI" startups [1][3].

5. Financials / Funding

• €3M research grant from XTX Markets (announced Dec 17, 2024) — to formalize up to 100k+ items and open-source reasoning models [1].
• $131,072 AIMO Progress Prize #1 (July 2024) with NuminaMath 7B [1].
• Numina Fellowship — 12–18 month research collaborations with $50k–$200k per project in compute + tooling [2].
• No disclosed venture rounds or valuation (non-profit).

6. People & Relationships

• Co-founder / President: Yann Fleureau.
• Co-founder / Chief Scientist: Jia Li (Olympiad coach; curated validation sets and training data).
• Founding partner: Alexandre Momeni (ex-Stanford ML research scientist, ex-General Catalyst) [4].
• Early team / advisors: Hélène Evain; Guillaume Lample (Mistral co-founder) and Stanislas Polu reportedly aided the founding.
• Partners: Moonshot AI (kimi, Kimina-Prover), ByteDance Seed (Kakeya) [1]; grant funder XTX Markets.
• Competitors: google-deepmind, axiom.

Sources

[1] local: 2026-09-28-summary.md — Numina core product, self-training vs public-compute route, Kimi-Prover + ByteDance Seed (Kakeya) cooperation and timeline, team. [2] Project Numina, "Numina Fellowship," https://projectnumina.ai/fellowship (2026-10-05) [3] "Numina-Lean-Agent: An Open and General Agentic Reasoning System for Formal Mathematics," arXiv 2601.14027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14027v1 (2026-10-05) [4] Crunchbase, "Alexandre Momeni — Founding Partner @ Project Numina," https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alexandre-momeni-20c4 (2026-10-05)