- Note-taking and collaboration app company Notion Labs has raised $10 million in funding at a valuation of $800 million
Notion Labs — a note-taking and collaboration app company — recently raised $10 million in funding from a group of all-star angel investors including Daniel Gross (former Y Combinator partner), Elad Gil (entrepreneur), Aydin Senkut (founder of Felicis Ventures), Ram Shriram (Sherpalo Investors), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), and Lachy Groom (former head of Stripe Issuing). This round of funding was reportedly based on a valuation of $800 million, according to sources with The Information.
Founded by Chris Prucha, Ivan Zhao, Wai Lam, and Simon Last, Notion also hired former LinkedIn India head Akshay Kothari as COO last year. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Kothari had previously sold Pulse News to the professional social network company for $90 million in 2013.
Notion is considered a replacement for apps to manage documents, wikis, and tasks. Currently, Notion has around 25 employees and staying at a smaller size has helped the company move faster.
Back in February, Zhao told Business Insider that Notion decided not to list the company office address on Google Maps so that perspective VCs would not show up uninvited anymore as there has been that much interest in the company.
“We’re not anti-VC,” Zhao told Business Insider back then. “It’s more about helping us focus on product and less on meetings.”
Notion is currently profitable and it has more than 1 million registered users. So why did Notion raise the funding? Kothari told Business Insider Notion gave some of its investors convertible notes — which is debt financing that is often used by early-stage startups. Those notes needed to be converted and some of them carried interest. So Notion wanted to “close those out.”
The funding will be used for hiring roles that will be necessary as Notion’s customer base becomes larger. For example, the company counts Intercom and Hearst Media — which both have over 1,000. And Notion wants to ensure that it has enough account managers to handle customers of that size.
Notion never used paid marketing tools like Google or Facebook ads for signing up new customers. So Notion may try out paid acquisition channels, according to Business Insider.
And how did Notion settle on the $800 million valuation? Part of it was to avoid the “craze” associated with reaching unicorn status ($1 billion or more valuation). And the company also considered the valuations of other SaaS companies like Zoom and Slack.
