In an interview, Ivan Zhao, founder and chief government of Notion, stated 40% of the engineers that the corporate is presently hiring could be based mostly in Hyderabad.
“We’re specializing in hiring much more right here. In truth, Hyderabad is our solely engineering centre that’s exterior of the US,” Zhao stated. The centre in Hyderabad was arrange following Notion’s acquisition of workflow automation platform, Automate.io in a money and inventory deal in September 2021. The latter’s providers and operations had been absolutely built-in into Notion on 31 October, in keeping with Automate.io’s web site.
In response to Zhao, Notion presently has 35 workers in India, a determine that he goals to extend within the close to future.
As a platform, Notion gives doc writing, database and information administration, and undertaking administration as three providers unified below one platform. Zhao claimed that that is what differentiates the platform from different real-time office collaboration and administration platforms equivalent to Asana and Slack, and even Microsoft Groups.
However, not like its friends, Notion has leveraged its reputation on TikTok amid the pandemic to create communities of shoppers globally, together with in India.
“Practically 70-80% of our user-based communities are exterior of the US. India is among the sizable communities for us on this regard; whereas it’s nonetheless not within the high 5 among the many international communities, it is among the quickest rising ones amongst our high 10 or 15 geographies,” Zhao stated.
These communities have helped bolster Notion’s consumer base. Zhao stated whereas the corporate presently stories “over 20 million month-to-month energetic customers,” the precise determine is “rather more.”
Nonetheless, he declined to share the break up between client and enterprise customers; solely stating that Notion’s income is “predominantly from B2B operations.”
“Quite a lot of our customers are B2C, however our income stream is predominantly from companies. It’s in round 2019 that we made our ‘private consumer’ plan nearly fully free, and this consists of restricted storage as effectively. We serve startups, mid-sized corporations and enormous enterprises. Our product is given without cost, or for actually low cost, to shoppers. This helped us construct a very good group of customers all over the world, who then took our platform to their workplaces, which helped develop our enterprise,” he stated.
Describing the platform as being “fabricated from Legos”, Zhao stated that customers are in the present day leveraging the pliability to construct their very own options equivalent to doc templates on Notion. “Final yr, we had numerous customers who earned over $1 million inside a yr, simply by promoting Notion templates or apps that may work on high of our platform. On web sites equivalent to Etsy, we’ve got tons of people that promote Notion templates,” he stated.
Zhao stated Notion has leveraged this reputation to already change into worthwhile regardless that he claims to haven’t spent “most” of the corporate’s enterprise capital funding. The newest spherical occurred in October 2021, when it raised $275 million in a funding spherical led by Coatue Administration and Sequoia Capital. The corporate was valued at $10 billion on the time.
The corporate is steadily utilizing this funding to develop its implementation of generative AI — which it rolled out final month below ‘Notion AI’.
“We work with distributors to offer the AI instrument, of which OpenAI is one. We use a number of off the shelf language fashions, and faucet the present information on Notion to feed into the AI fashions. By doing this, Notion AI will perceive your beforehand written paperwork in addition to ongoing tasks, to offer outcomes which can be very particularly tailor-made to what one explicit consumer is writing. That is higher compared to a generic platform like ChatGPT, which doesn’t have context of 1 explicit consumer’s prior work,” Zhao stated.
To make sure, use circumstances and functions of generative AI gained prominence after the launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot final November. The instrument, which amassed over 100 million energetic customers inside the first two months of launching, has since seen a number of rivals and compatriots form up, together with Google’s personal language model-based Bard, and Microsoft’s ChatGPT-based Prometheus Mannequin powering Bing AI search.
The expertise has seen widespread curiosity from all quarters — on 16 April, Mint reported that India’s high schools are endeavor generative AI analysis to resolve particular use circumstances inside academia and analysis. One other report on 18 April detailed how India’s bellwether data expertise (IT) providers trade is racing to construct generative AI capabilities for purchasers throughout monetary providers, healthcare, retail and different industries.
It’s the latter side, coupled with the much-debated side of belief and authenticity within the supply materials of a generative AI instrument, that Zhao stated Notion is specializing in.
“Notion in the present day is among the first standard cases of AI embedded in current workflows and inside a writing software program, made accessible in a platform the place customers are literally working. What works for us when it comes to AI is that individuals already belief the knowledge and information they’re feeding to the AI in Notion, which is a bonus compared to bigger rivals,” he stated.
This, nonetheless, comes with its personal challenges. In response to Zhao, these embrace the price of AI engineers, in addition to the price of distributors that promote the big language fashions and AI algorithms behind generative instruments. For Notion, OpenAI is one in all its distributors, and whereas Zhao stated that the corporate can also be working with a number of different distributors, he didn’t disclose their names.
Past this, one key problem for Notion additionally lies to find the precise technique to implement AI.
“Integrating AI effectively takes much more, and depends upon the standard that you simply need to create inside a workflow. AI will not be free, so this wanted us to determine a brand new pricing mannequin the place we can’t give all of the options to all customers. There may be additionally a consumer expertise drawback in integrating AI effectively — if you would like simply AI solutions, you possibly can merely go to ChatGPT or Google Bard. However, if you would like AI in a instrument that you simply’d use on a regular basis, you’d want to determine intelligent consumer interface or structure trade-offs, which is lots more durable,” he stated.
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