Introduction: Notion announced this month that it has received a new round of US$50 million in financing, and the company’s valuation has risen from US$800 million to US$2 billion. A spokesperson for Notion said that after this round of financing, the company's total fundraising has reached 67 million US dollars. According to Notion, the number of users of the company has grown rapidly, which has quadrupled its number at the beginning of 2019.
So what is Notion? Notion is a cross-platform collaboration tool that combines notes, knowledge base, and task management. It supports Markdown and can also be accessed through most browsers. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA.
Like Yuan Zheng, the founder of the current hot video conferencing software company Zoom, Notion’s founder Ivan Zhao is also a Chinese who grew up in China and started a business overseas. One point of Ivan Zhao's is that creation is the best way to learn (Learning by making.). This also affected the thinking behind Notion's product design.
Notion also introduced the story of the birth of Notion in detail on the official website, which can help to better understand the history of Notion.
This is a report by The New York Times on Notion's completion of a new round of financing of 50 million US dollars. From this, you can get a glimpse of the Notion team's attitude towards start-ups towards venture capital, and its thinking on user growth and product development.
Collaborative software start-up Notion raised US$50 million
Although many start-ups are struggling to deal with the impact of the new crown epidemic, this San Francisco-based company has received more More cash to survive.
Image from Notion
Ivan Zhao founded Notion in 2013, which is a productivity software start-up company that has been profitable since 2018.
San Francisco-The spread of the new coronavirus means a feast or famine for technology start-ups. While many people have laid off employees and cut costs due to the outbreak, the demand of others has surged.
One of the lucky examples is Notion, a productivity start-up with a workplace in San Francisco. Its tools help people organize and track their work. As more and more people are now working remotely and switching to such products, the number of newly registered users in Notion has reached a new high in recent weeks.
This allows the startup to obtain new funding. On Wednesday, Notion said it had raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors, valuing the company at $2 billion. Previously, Notion was valued at 800 million US dollars.
Last week, after the virus forced Notion's founder and CEO Ivan Zhao and Notion's chief operating officer Akshay Kothari to reflect on their previous stance of not being overly dependent on venture capital, Notion was completed within 36 hours The work of introducing new investors.
In a moment of uncertainty, Notion’s COO Kothari said: “Funding is a stable signal, which is very important to us.”
Therefore, they called Sarah Cannon, an investor in Index Ventures, She has been seeking to invest in Notion for more than a year. She said: "When the world changed, they changed their minds."
Notion is the symbol of the kind of technology-based startups that may be able to withstand the reshuffle of Silicon Valley. Its tools can help those who are now isolated from home to workClan work together more seamlessly. Notion is also profitable.
Before the latest financing, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised US$17 million. The company declined to disclose its revenue, but said it has been making money since 2018.
Notion Bright black and white products provide "templates" for lists and items, for example, for recruiting new employees, tracking product development, or managing editorial calendars. People use Notion instead of note-taking applications, collaboration services or writing software, and pay a monthly fee of $4 to $20 per month to get more features, such as higher security and storage space.
Venture capitalist Ram Shriram invested in Notion in 2013. He said that in many companies, “many of the products we use were designed in the 1990s.” He said, new office spaces that use the Internet and other advanced technologies There is still room for development of the productivity tools adopted, and people can collaborate while working and obtain the latest data in real time.
Ivan Zhao founded Notion after graduating from Columbia University and working for Inkling, a file sharing startup in San Francisco. He initially raised US$2 million and spent several years developing the product.
Once, Noion was severely short of cash and fired four employees. In 2016, Ivan Zhao borrowed US$150,000 from his mother to maintain the operation of this startup.
When Ivan Zhao released Notion in the same year, the situation changed. It quickly became popular among technicians and early adopters of companies such as Samsung and Hearst.
MetaLab, a design agency with 140 designers in Vancouver, Notion has replaced 12 different tools, including Google Slides and project management software Trello. MetaLab says it uses Notion to show work to customers and collect their feedback in one place, among other tasks.
MetaLab's director of operations and marketing, Justin Watt, said of the software: “It’s not trying to be everything for everyone.” “The killer feature is that these features are created by you.”
This attraction has attracted venture capitalists and others who wanted to invest in Notion last year. But Shana Fisher, an investor in Third Kind Venture Capital, who had previously supported the startup, reminded Ivan Zhao not to raise too much money because it might be distracting.
Notion has users in countries such as Russia, Japan and Germany. Since May last year, its users have organized more than 180 gatherings in 21 countries and 52 cities.
By the beginning of last year, Notion has nearly 1 million users. Notion's chief operating officer Kothari said that since then, this number has tripled.
The company is relatively small, with only 42 employees. People eager to work here took an amazing amount of time-one person recently gave out a pack of cupcakes with his face decorated with the words "Hire me!"
Ivan Zhao said he was right Be cautious about slow growth, slow start-up speed and decline in product quality.
""Moby Dick" was written independently by one person," he said. "Adding other people's collaborative creation does not necessarily bring you a higher quality "Moby Dick". It does not even make it complete faster."
Annotation: "Moby Dick" (Moby Dick ) Is an ocean-themed novel published in 1851 by the American novelist Herman Melville in the 19th century. It is considered the greatest novel in AmericaOne of the novels.
Now, start-up companies are in a difficult period to rely on more mature customers for growth. Last year, Notion expanded its services to larger corporate customers, who usually require a large number of sales representatives and need to negotiate complex contracts.
Notion has already hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit customers in person under social distancing. It also has new features built into its software (such as options to indicate who can access and edit documents) to meet the legal, security, and compliance requirements of large companies.
Notion's chief operating officer Kothari said that Notion can easily raise more than 50 million US dollars, but this money gives the company at least 10 years of operating capital.
"Ten years is enough," Notion founder Ivan Zhao said.
Original title "Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million"
