From left, Notion founders Akshay Kothari, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last.
Notion
OpenAI’s public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is widely viewed as the event that kicked off the generative AI boom, which remains the dominant theme in the tech industry almost three years later.
Notion jumped on the bandwagon early.
Two weeks before ChatGPT hit the market, the productivity software startup announced its own artificial intelligence feature using an OpenAI model. Notion AI was designed to be a “writing assistant” that could help a user with brainstorming, editing and summarizing, the company said.
“We’re at an important inflection point,” CEO Ivan Zhao wrote in a blog post at the time. “The potential of artificial intelligence has grown exponentially, and will continue to grow.”
The AI wave has pushed Notion past $500 million in annualized revenue, the company now tells CNBC, which ranked the company 34th on its 2025 Disruptor 50 list. The latest developments landed on Thursday as Notion launched a customizable agent that can create documents to pull in data from many sources, using models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Akshay Kothari, Notion’s co-founder and operating chief, said in an interview that the company is racing to keep up with enterprise demand for AI tools. Corporate clients include 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 said. He added that about 90% of the business comes from “multiplayer usage,” or teams of workers.
Notion was founded in 2013, two years before OpenAI was created as a nonprofit AI lab. The company, which now has about 1,000 employees, launched the first version of its product in 2016 and says it has over 100 million users.
But unlike most startups that have boomed with the rise of generative AI, Notion hasn’t raised outside capital in a long time. Its most recent fundraising round came in 2021, when the big driver for cloud-based collaboration software was the Covid pandemic and remote work. In October of that year, Notion raised $275 million at a $10 billion valuation.
Kothari says the company has more cash on hand than the $330 million it’s raised to date.
In May, Notion introduced Ai products for summarizing meetings and searching through corporate files. Annual revenue growth has accelerated every month since then, Kothari said, though he declined to provide growth rates.
Thursday’s announcement includes the rollout of a preview of an additional feature called custom agents, which can perform actions in the background. As an example, a custom agent can be instructed to produce and send a list of articles that are relevant to a person’s interests every week.
Kothari said that last year 10% to 20% of Notion customers were paying for AI add-ons. That shot up to 30% or 40% earlier this year and recently crossed 50%, he said.
At that point, the company started including AI in its business and enterprise plans, without charging extra, Kothari said, adding that the company is talking with clients about a fair pricing model for custom agents.
Productivity software is a highly competitive space, with Microsoft and Google at the center.
Weeks after Notion’s big financing round in 2021, Microsoft announced Loop, an app for working on documents. The product, which resembles Notion, became available to organizations with Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions in 2023.
Microsoft is also pushing Copilot, an AI assistant that can spit out Word documents and Outlook emails. Google, meanwhile, offers the Gemini AI option for its Google Workspace applications.
Ramp, a business credit card startup, pays for the Gemini AI option for Google Workspace apps. But the company has encouraged people to migrate documents and project tracking to Notion, said Ben Levick, Ramp’s head of operations, in an email.
Levick said that nine out of 10 employees at Ramp, which has a workforce of 1,200, now use Notion’s AI features every month, and the company is testing custom agents to answer internal inquiries and to connect sales feedback with forthcoming products that could address requests from clients.
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