Back in January, we penned Notion as one of the startups to keep an eye on in 2019. We also wrote about how our community loves Notion, and reference it as an app that changed their lives. Turns out, they might have been on the nose. Last night, The Information reported that the San Francisco based startup is raising $10M, hitting a wild $800M valuation with its new funding (that it’s referring to as an ‘angel round’).
A little background: Notion is a powerful note-taking app that does it all when it comes to productivity (think the best features of Dropbox, Excel and Google Docs). Notion first launched on Product Hunt three years ago (h/t to Naval for the hunt), and won a Golden Kitty in 2016 for Best Desktop Product.
A note back then from Notion founder Ivan Zhao:
“Notion wants to challenge this status quo of ‘software as silos.’ For the 1.0 release, we are bundling real-time documents, wiki-like organization, and lightweight tasks into a unified tool that can handle pretty much all your team's knowledge needs – and this is just the beginning.”
Clearly.
Some initial reactions from the PH community:
“The thinking that went into designing Notion was clearly a cut above the rest. Nice work on it so far, can't wait to see where you all take it” - Alexander
“It will totally replace all my Google Docs + Trello + Dropbox Paper + bunchofotherstuff craziness. Thank you for the great product” - Kitze
“I must echo the sentiment that so many people here share; Notion is a well-conceived and expertly executed tool for knowledge work. I have used, and considered the merits of so many solutions purporting to solve the problems involved in contemporary knowledge work, and to my mind, none understand the problem quite as well as the team behind Notion.” - Sky
It’s worth noting that this $10M is Notion’s first major funding round, as it has historically given up very little equity in the six years since it was founded. However, the app didn’t launch publicly until 2016, and now has over a million registered users.
Another thing worth noting: Zhao openly shared on Product Hunt that Notion nearly ran out of money at the time of its 1.0 launch, and thanked his mom for financial help.
It seems she should be seeing a positive return on her investment. 😉
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