Notion Plans Hiring Binge as CEO Makes All-In Bet on AI

As AI has reordered Silicon Valley, it has ushered in an adapt-or-die reckoning for quite a few members of tech’s older generations.

That’s true even for 13-year-old Notion, which shot to popularity in the 2010s with a slick note-taking app. In recent years, the company has found itself in an awkward middle ground. By some measures, it remains a tech darling: Its revenue has surged over that period of time, and CEO Ivan Zhao is a celebrity in tech circles for his elevated taste in software design.

By other measures, the Notion story looks less rosy: Usage of its mobile app is stalling, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, and the startup hasn’t raised money at a time when venture capital is free-flowing. And like other software companies born in the pre-AI era, Notion faces questions about whether alternatives to its products from the new AI labs could eat its lunch. To address those concerns, Zhao has thrown himself and his company into overdrive, reorienting Notion almost totally around AI.

Notion plans to increase its headcount roughly 30% this year, with the new roles largely devoted to building AI products alongside and selling them to customers, according to a person familiar with the business. The company has debuted a slew of AI features for its customers, most notably one that allows them to make their own custom agents for handling repetitive tasks. It has also introduced AI that transcribes meetings, automates databases and allows people to search their Slack messages and Google Drives without leaving Notion’s app.

Inside Notion, staff have already created thousands of agents for the company’s own use, developing ones that suggest sales leads, offer feedback on products and make it easier to access what they know about a customer. (At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Notion made special time for an employee to present an agent for the glorious tasks of budgeting and financial planning.) Some Notion employees that once crunched numbers on the company’s data science team now labor mostly on prompting agents, said the person familiar with the business.

Zhao himself has been public in his evangelizing of the technology. In a video published in May by Sequoia Capital, one of Notion’s investors, Zhao likened testing OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023 to “a full-body religious experience.”

Zhao’s all-in bet on AI has yielded some favorable results. Last December, Notion’s annual recurring revenue passed $600 million, and that figure has continued to increase in the months since, according to the person familiar with the business, who wouldn’t share the company’s exact growth. (For context, three years ago, Notion had around $250 million in total revenue.) Notion remains cash flow positive, according to another person, even as the costs involved in developing its AI features have mounted.

Meanwhile, various companies have approached Notion looking to buy it, said one of the people, who wouldn’t specify when exactly those acquisition overtures occurred. That person insisted that Zhao and his co-founders still see a path for Notion to remain an independent company.

Among Notion’s staff, some employees hunger for the simplicity of an outright sale to a bigger company. Some of them point to Anthropic as a hoped-for suitor. The two companies have a relationship: Notion offers Anthropic models as an option in its AI tools. Anthropic, for its part, says Notion served as a design partner in Claude Code’s early development.

Also feeding employees’ hopes is the fact that Zhao is married to Yasmin Razavi, a Spark Capital partner who sits on the AI lab’s board of directors, though there’s no indication that Razavi has been involved in any conversations that involve Notion and Anthropic. (If a potential deal ever did materialize, she’d likely need to recuse herself from the discussions to avoid a conflict of interest.)

Zhao’s bid for a rapid, AI-juiced reinvention offers a window on the forces at work at countless other software makers across Silicon Valley. Whether Zhao can pull it off remains in question as he faces stiff competition from the new generation of AI startups and older tech businesses like his own that are seeking revitalization. Like many other startups, Notion is building its AI products using models from other companies—a somewhat perilous position since those model providers may one day make their own rival apps. Zhao has also lately faced some departures of staff who helped implement Notion’s shift to AI.

If Zhao’s effort fails, Notion risks the same fate that befell Airtable, another productivity software startup that sprang to life around the same time as Notion. Earlier this month, Airtable agreed to sell itself to Bending Spoons, a publicly traded Italian company that has bought other aging tech companies like AOL, for just under $1.3 billion—much less than the $11 billion valuation Airtable received in 2021. (Notion was valued at $11 billion in a December employee share sale, a number slightly bigger than the $10 billion valuation it received at its private fundraising in 2021.)

Notion earns money mostly through subscriptions. It has a free version of its software, which runs both on mobile devices and desktops. That version provides its longstanding note-taking and organizational tools as well as a limited trial of its AI. A $10 version provides access to a chatbot and a trial of its other AI tools.

For business customers, Notion sells a version (monthly cost: $20 per user) that offers its suite of new AI tools, including a trial of the one for building agents. Running those agents requires businesses to plunk down more money based on monthly usage, a pricing setup now widely used across Silicon Valley as companies try to pass some of the costs of their AI tools to users. Notion’s customers include companies at the forefront of AI, like OpenAI and Nvidia, and a full stable of traditional ones, too, such as L’Oréal and Toyota.

Notion holds a special place in the hearts of many people in Silicon Valley. Industry insiders were among the most rabid fans of its original note-taking app—akin to the goodwill that Granola, an AI-focused note-taking app, has recently accumulated. They were also its loudest cheerleaders when the company won more prominence during the pandemic as its software became popular with people trying to cope with remote work. Zhao enjoys a reputation as a Silicon Valley cool kid, cultivating an aura for himself as a design aesthete. One Notion investor I spoke with described both him and co-founder Simon Last as “crafters.” (Zhao once considered a career as a photographer.)

The investor also acknowledged that Zhao, Last and Notion’s third co-founder, Akshay Kothari, aren’t “prototypical for Silicon Valley.” And while other founders might have already sold out or thrown in the towel, they have preferred to soldier on.

“They could see themselves doing this for a long time—and want to be in control of their own destiny,” the investor said.

When Zhao and Last started Notion in 2013, they initially set out to make a software-editing program. The idea didn’t win over many customers, and within a couple years, they’d nearly burned through their initial seed money, which included funding from First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman. In 2015, they laid off most of their employees, gave up their San Francisco office and holed up in a Kyoto, Japan, apartment to regroup. By 2016, they had turned their attention to note-taking and productivity tools, which soon won a devoted following among users who liked how Notion made it easy to draft text and manage databases alongside each other.

Kothari joined Zhao and Last two years later. The following year, Notion raised $10 million at an $800 million valuation, drawing investors like Elad Gil and former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, who is now one of Meta Platform’s AI czars. At that time, Kothari claimed they could’ve scored an even higher valuation but wanted to tamp down the “hype” around the company, as he put it in a 2019 interview with The Information. “Hopefully, we never have to raise again,” he said. (The company was already “net profitable,” Kothari added.)

But when the pandemic struck and Notion received a surge of new users, Zhao and his co-founders went back to investors for more money, raising $275 million in the 2021 financing led by Sequoia and Coatue Management, which valued the company at $10 billion.

Two weeks before OpenAI publicly unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022, Notion took its first whack at an AI product: a writing assistant, which it offered to a limited number of users. It rolled out a separate AI tool the following year for searching across notes and databases, and then it combined its initial AI features into one chatbot in 2024. Last year, it introduced its AI meeting and note-taking service, keeping pace with both Granola’s surging popularity and similar note-taking features embedded in meeting apps like Zoom and Google Meet.

As Notion has gone after larger customers, it has started working with a legion of 250 or so independent consultants who help businesses implement Notion and its AI tools into small- to medium-size companies.

“We wanted to enter into the space of, how does Notion actually work for businesses with many people?” said Josh Redd, one of those consultants. “We wanted to solve the problem of, how does a business of 100, 1,000 or even 10,000 people use Notion?”

Data from Sensor Tower, which tracks the use of apps like Notion, complicates the picture of growth presented by Notion’s increasing recurring revenue. In the U.S., the company’s monthly active users on its mobile app fell 13% in the second quarter compared to a year ago. Historically, Notion has seen a majority of its users come from outside the U.S. In the second quarter, it saw no growth among monthly mobile users in Europe and just over 1% growth in Asia. (Since the Sensor Tower data only accounts for mobile devices, it does not provide any insight on the software’s popularity among desktop users—the type of corporate users that the company has lately been targeting.)

Some of Notion’s AI talent has trickled out of the company. Jackie Rocca, who worked on product features like databases and some AI tools, left in 2025 after 10 months. (She now works at Meta.) Lauryn Motamedi, the company’s vice president of growth and product, departed in July. And Chief Marketing Officer Lena Waters left in April after just a year at the company.

As Zhao charts a path forward for Notion, it’s unclear whether he can succeed at keeping it a private company indefinitely, as Stripe and other Web 2.0 companies have done. Recent cautionary tales in tech could further discourage him from going public. Figma, for example, has seen its stock lose more than three-quarters of its value since its 2025 IPO as investors worry about the impact AI will have on its business. Then again, many software stocks rallied hard this past week as investors seemed to reconsider whether AI competition would hurt those businesses.

A discreet but possibly hopeful sign of Notion’s enduring buzziness came in July. That month Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and other media and tech billionaires gathered for Allen & Co.’s annual power summit in Sun Valley, Idaho. Zhao went, too, clad in his trademark minimalist attire. It was the first time he had attended.