From left, Notion founders Akshay Kothari, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last.
Notion
OpenAI’s public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is broadly seen as the occasion that kicked off the generative AI increase, which stays the dominant theme in the tech business virtually three years later.
Notion jumped on the bandwagon early.
Two weeks earlier than ChatGPT hit the market, the productiveness software program startup announced its personal synthetic intelligence function utilizing an OpenAI mannequin. Notion AI was designed to be a “writing assistant” that would assist a consumer with brainstorming, modifying and summarizing, the corporate stated.
“We’re at an important inflection point,” CEO Ivan Zhao wrote in a weblog put up on the time. “The potential of artificial intelligence has grown exponentially, and will continue to grow.”
The AI wave has pushed Notion previous $500 million in annualized revenue, the corporate now tells CNBC, which ranked the corporate thirty fourth on its 2025 Disruptor 50 list. The newest developments landed on Thursday as Notion launched a customizable agent that may create paperwork to tug in information from many sources, utilizing fashions from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Akshay Kothari, Notion’s co-founder and working chief, stated in an interview that the corporate is racing to maintain up with enterprise demand for AI instruments. Corporate purchasers embrace Kaiser Permanente, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nvidia and Volvo Cars.
“We’re doubling this year and likely going to double the sales team next year,” Kothari stated. He added that about 90% of the enterprise comes from “multiplayer usage,” or groups of employees.
Notion was based in 2013, two years earlier than OpenAI was created as a nonprofit AI lab. The firm, which now has about 1,000 workers, launched the primary model of its product in 2016 and says it has over 100 million customers.
But in contrast to most startups which have boomed with the rise of generative AI, Notion hasn’t raised outdoors capital in a very long time. Its most recent fundraising round got here in 2021, when the massive driver for cloud-based collaboration software program was the Covid pandemic and distant work. In October of that yr, Notion raised $275 million at a $10 billion valuation.
Kothari says the corporate has extra cash readily available than the $330 million it’s raised up to now.
In May, Notion launched Ai merchandise for summarizing conferences and looking by means of company recordsdata. Annual revenue development has accelerated each month since then, Kothari stated, although he declined to offer development charges.
Thursday’s announcement contains the rollout of a preview of a further function referred to as customized brokers, which may carry out actions in the background. As an instance, a customized agent will be instructed to supply and ship a listing of articles which might be related to an individual’s pursuits each week.
Kothari stated that final yr 10% to twenty% of Notion clients had been paying for AI add-ons. That shot as much as 30% or 40% earlier this yr and not too long ago crossed 50%, he stated.
At that time, the corporate began together with AI in its enterprise and enterprise plans, with out charging additional, Kothari stated, including that the corporate is speaking with purchasers a couple of honest pricing mannequin for customized brokers.
Productivity software program is a extremely aggressive area, with Microsoft and Google on the heart.
Weeks after Notion’s large financing spherical in 2021, Microsoft announced Loop, an app for engaged on paperwork. The product, which resembles Notion, grew to become accessible to organizations with Microsoft 365 productiveness software program subscriptions in 2023.
Microsoft can be pushing Copilot, an AI assistant that may spit out Word paperwork and Outlook emails. Google, in the meantime, affords the Gemini AI possibility for its Google Workspace functions.
Ramp, a enterprise bank card startup, pays for the Gemini AI possibility for Google Workspace apps. But the corporate has inspired individuals emigrate paperwork and venture monitoring to Notion, stated Ben Levick, Ramp’s head of operations, in an e mail.
Levick stated that 9 out of 10 workers at Ramp, which has a workforce of 1,200, now use Notion’s AI options each month, and the corporate is testing customized brokers to reply inside inquiries and to attach gross sales suggestions with forthcoming merchandise that would handle requests from purchasers.
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