I think profitability helps you to control destiny a lot better because you’re not out fundraising every year or 18 months,” Kothari says. “I guess we were profitable before profitability became cool. The round was less about raising more cash than it was about closing convertible notes, Kothari tells TechCrunch, noting that Notion has been profitable for the last 12-18 months. The Information‘s Amir Efrati reported earlier this year that Notion had raised a $10 million “angel round” at an $800 million valuation. Notion has raised millions in funding from investors like First Round Capital, Ron and Ronny Conway, Elad Gill and most recently Daniel Gross. “ doesn’t have a board, it doesn’t have a whole lot of external voices, pretty much everyone in this office decides what we’re doing next.” Our preference is to stay small,” he says. “We definitely want to create a large company, a company that could eventually go public or whatever is the right - you know it’s too early for a lot of that stuff. Notion has been iterating its product rather quickly for a company that has 9 engineers and no PMs, but Kothari says that they don’t believe piling more money or doubling employees is going to be the key to scaling more quickly. Notion is working on tools to help it court larger enterprise customers as well, including offline access, better permission systems and an API that can help developers connect their services to the platform. Notion’s pitch contrasts pretty heavily with the overarching enterprise SaaS trends which has seen a wealth of specialized software tools hitting the market. The company is pitching customers a vision of consolidated workplace services that are built so end-users can customize them to their needs. “There are a lot of similarities between us and the early stages of Slack in terms of engineering and product design people loving it, tech and media loving it, but one unique thing about us is that you can use Notion alone. The company offers a couple pricing tiers depending on size, but individuals can also use the software for $5 per month, something that Kothari believes offers it advantages over other tools in driving adoption inside companies. Notion itself is unsurprisingly a power user of its product, running everything but internal and external communications on its own software. Kothari says their platform seems to work best for startups in the sub-50 and sub-100 employee range, but they do have larger customers like UK banking startup Monzo which has organized their 1,300+ employees around the platform. “Our goal with the new program is getting to the point where if you’re a new company, you don’t even think about it, you just start with Notion.” “I think we find ourselves in a really interesting spot where I think YC startups know about us and start with it,” COO Akshay Kothari says. The new program is part of the company’s efforts to embed their platform as an “operating system” for startups early-on and then scale as their customers do. They have approached and partnered with dozens of accelerators around the globe including Y Combinator, 500 Startups and TechStars to bring their portfolio startups onto Notion’s platform, offering admitted startups $1,000 in free services each. Over half of the startups from Y Combinator’s most recent batch are Notion customers, the company tells TechCrunch, and the startup seems intent to accelerate their adoption among small teams. Notion charges startups $8 per employee (when billed annually) to use the service. Notion has north of 1 million users and has attracted thousands of young startups to its platform, which combines notes, wikis and databases into a versatile tool that can help small teams cut down on the number of enterprise software subscriptions they’re paying for. Notion Labs, a profitable work tools startup that recently hit a reported $800 million valuation, isn’t making it easy for VC firms to give them money, but they are partnering with some of them alongside top accelerators like Y Combinator in an effort to become another household name in work software. Startups building work software for other startups have been a huge focus of investment in Silicon Valley as eager VCs hope to grab a piece of the next Slack.
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