Nuwa Pen AI-Powered Ballpoint Pen
Nuwa Pen is an AI-powered ballpoint pen that captures, digitizes, and records your notes—even when written on a coffee shop napkin. The pen’s small, sleek form conceals a ton of smart technology. The Nuwa team wanted to emphasize the sleek, small form factor, but there’s a TON of smart technology inside it.
We first connected with Nuwa at a hardware meetup in SF. Nuwa was developing an AI-powered ballpoint pen with three tiny cameras in the tip that capture handwritten information as you write. They were already far along in the development process and had an industrial design they liked, but they were working through some technical problems. Because of our extensive experience developing smart pens and compact devices with microlenses, we understood their challenges right away. Nuwa brought in the Tact team to quickly fine-tune their force sensor and shore up the camera connections—all without touching the industrial design.
During our engineering refinements, we highlighted potential risks in Nuwa’s supply chain and some concerns about their vendors’ capabilities. At Nuwa’s request, our manufacturing experts conducted a thorough review to minimize these risks. We strengthened critical elements of their Master Services Agreement and enhanced supply chain resilience—addressing vulnerabilities that could severely impact a young startup.
[ Industrial Design by Nuwa pen ]
Later, in their New Product Introduction phase, they asked us back to resolve a critical reliability issue. Working directly with Nuwa, we debugged an injection molding problem, suggesting new molding parameters that avoided costly reengineering and retooling.
Each hand-written note is captured by the Nuwa Pen. The writing is then digitized and becomes searchable and shareable through the Nuwa Infinite Canvas app. Rather than having your brilliant ideas, important notes, and to-do lists scattered across notebooks, sticky notes, and paper scraps, everything is neatly organized in the app.
In addition to proposing specific modifications to fine-tune the force sensor and shore up camera connections in the pen, the Tact team helped Nuwa modify the pen’s charging case to capture the pen and connect to the pogo pins more securely.
