Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million

The New York Times on Notion’s $50M raise in the first weeks of the pandemic.

Why it was kept

The excerpts Kyle kept are the ones about why the product spread: templates for everything from onboarding to editorial calendars, a tool that is “what you make of it”, users organising 180 meetups in 21 countries, and roughly four million users by early 2020 — plus the first hints of the enterprise push (salespeople, permissions, compliance). He filed it alongside Roam and Evernote, the tools it was competing with for how people take notes.

As Kyle captured it

• Read “Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million by Erin Griffith at The New York Times Notion Roam Research #Evernote
  • One of the lucky ones is Notion, a workplace productivity start-up based in San Francisco, whose tools help people organize and track their work. With more people working remotely now and turning to such products, new customer sign-ups hit a new high for Notion in recent weeks.
  • Notion’s stark black-and-white product offers “templates” of checklists and projects for, say, bringing on new hires, tracking product development, or managing editorial calendars for marketers. People use Notion in place of note-taking apps, collaboration services or writing software, and they pay a monthly fee of $4 to $20 each for extra features like more security and storage.
  • “It’s not trying to be everything to everyone,” Justin Watt, MetaLab’s director of operations and marketing, said of the software. “The killer feature is that it is what you make of it.”
  • Notion has users in countries including Russia, Japan and Germany. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities.
  • By early last year, Notion had nearly one million users. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said.
  • Notion has hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit clients in person while social distancing is in effect. **It is also building new features into its software — like options for dictating who can access and edit documents **— to satisfy larger companies’ legal, security and compliance requirements.