Notion (Productivity Software Company)

Ivan Zhao began developing the first version of Notion while working at the San Francisco ebook startup Inkling; about a year later he left to assemble a team and offered an internship to Simon Last, then a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, who later dropped out to work on it full time. In 2013 the two raised about $2 million from angel investors including friends and family; Akshay Kothari and Mike Vernal, who later joined Sequoia Capital, were among the early angel investors.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

The company’s founding aim was to let people who cannot code make their own software tools, an idea Ivan Zhao has said was crystallized by Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 paper “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The first version was an app-building tool for non-programmers, but users were not interested; Zhao later admitted, “It was not really a product.”⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2015, the technical framework Notion had chosen crashed constantly, users were losing content, and the angel funding was running out. Zhao and Last laid off their only colleagues, sublet their San Francisco office, moved to the cheaper city of Kyoto, Japan, scrapped their code and rewrote the product from scratch using React. Looking back in 2024, Zhao said the company had rebuilt Notion four times during those early “lost years.”⁠[2][1][1][1][2][3]

After a year in Kyoto, Notion launched Notion 1.0 in March 2016, offering word processing, drag-and-drop to-do lists, wikis and more than 30 document templates; it was not yet charging users. To keep the company afloat, Zhao’s mother lent him $150,000. Promoted on social media by the investor Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry, the product gained early traction on Product Hunt.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In March 2018, Notion released Notion 2.0, which added project management capabilities and relational databases, and received a glowing review from David Pierce, personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. The company began charging monthly subscription fees of $4 to $10 and turned a profit. Ivan Zhao later said the company saw signs of traction only with the 2018 Product Hunt launch of Notion 2.0.⁠[1][1][1][3]

In the summer of 2018, when the team was only about eight people, Zhao offered a job to Akshay Kothari, an angel investor then working at LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry. Kothari joined as chief operating officer and spent his first six months answering support tickets. Zhao regards Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Notion reached one million users with only seed funding, a figure it released in early 2019. It had previously raised $10 million at an $800 million valuation.⁠[2][4][4]

In April 2020, Notion raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors at a $2 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $67 million. Kothari said total users had “nearly quadrupled” from one million. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, the company had about 40 employees, and the round was viewed as insurance against pandemic uncertainty.⁠[4][4][4][1]

As users surged during the pandemic, Notion went down on New Year’s Day 2021 after running out of database storage, with the site offline for four hours. For the next six months the company stopped building new features and focused on strengthening its infrastructure and migrating to multiple databases.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2021, Notion launched a beta of its public API, enabling developers to connect Notion to payment systems, customer relationship management software and other tools. On September 8 of that year, Ivan Zhao announced the acquisition of Automate.io, which built connectivity and integrations for more than 200 software tools, to accelerate native integrations. Hyderabad, India became Notion’s fifth office (alongside Dublin, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco) and its first engineering center outside the United States.⁠[1][5][5][5][5]

On October 8, 2021, Notion Labs announced a $275 million round led by Sequoia Capital and Coatue that raised its valuation from $2 billion in April 2020 to $10 billion, bringing total funding to more than $300 million; the company said its user base had grown 500% since the previous round.⁠[6][6][6]

On June 9, 2022, Notion announced the acquisition of the calendar app Cron, whose founder and chief executive Raphael Schaad and team joined Notion, with Cron continuing for the time being as a separate app. Ivan Zhao said the company’s mission was to “make software toolmaking ubiquitous.” That year Notion also acquired the software-building company Flowdash.⁠[7][7][7][1]

As of summer 2022, about 70% of Notion’s users were outside the United States; the company had opened offices in Dublin, New York, Tokyo and Hyderabad and had grown to 300 employees.⁠[1]

On February 22, 2023, Notion AI ended its invite-only testing and opened to all users, offering summarizing, rewriting and drafting features; nearly two million people had signed up for its alpha waitlist ten weeks earlier. It could be added to any plan for $10 per member per month.⁠[8][8][8][8]

On January 17, 2024, Notion launched Notion Calendar, based on Cron, which lets users view and update deadlines from Notion databases alongside calendar events and connect events to Notion pages.⁠[9][9][10]

On February 9, 2024, Akshay Kothari announced that Skiff, which offered end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar and email, was joining Notion. Skiff had been founded in 2020 by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg; after the acquisition its services were scheduled to shut down, and following user feedback the sunset period was extended from six months to 12 months.⁠[11][10][10][10]

In August 2024, Notion passed 100 million users; Ivan Zhao recalled that the company had reached one million users in 2020, just before Covid-19.⁠[3][3]

On April 15, 2025, Notion launched the email app Notion Mail, which uses Notion AI to auto-label incoming email and integrates with Notion Calendar for scheduling meetings.⁠[12][12][12]

On September 18, 2025, Notion released Notion 3.0, rebuilding Notion AI as Agents: anything a user can do in Notion, the agent can do for them, carrying out more than 20 minutes of multi-step actions across dozens of pages at once.⁠[13][13][13]

On February 24, 2026, Notion launched Custom Agents that run autonomously: once users give them a job and set a trigger or schedule, they handle work such as task triage, internal Q&A and status reports around the clock.⁠[14][14][14]

On May 13, 2026, Notion launched the Notion Developer Platform, letting users and their coding agents write code to sync any data and build agent tools running on Notion’s infrastructure, and to bring external agents such as Claude, Codex and Decagon into Notion.⁠[15][15]

On September 9, 2026, Notion introduced model controls for Business and Enterprise plans, allowing workspace owners to choose separately which AI models are available in Notion Agent and in Custom Agents.⁠[16][16]

On September 24, 2026, Ivan Zhao announced that Max Schoening, previously the company’s product and design leader, was becoming chief technology officer. Schoening had led early design at Heroku, worked on Cloud Run at Google and spent six and a half years at GitHub; Zhao said he led the 2026 launches of Custom Agents and the Developer Platform.⁠[17][17][17][17]

Notion 3.8, released on October 13, 2026, added seven new AI models, including GPT 6.1-Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5.⁠[18][18]

On October 19, 2026, Notion rebuilt its agent harness again, giving agents their own computer and browser and the ability to work on tasks for up to 24 hours; it also upgraded its Auto model router, saying it delivered results similar to Opus 5.5 across more than 20 common tasks at about 90% lower average cost. Notion said Notion MCP was its fastest-growing product ever and brought all AI usage under a new credit system.⁠[19][19][19][19][19]

Notion: Official website: https://www.notion.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/NotionHQ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]