From left, Akshay Kothari, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, the founders of the concept.
concept
Openai’s ChatGpt release in November 2022 is widely seen as an event that launched a generative AI boom that continues to be the dominant theme in the high-tech industry almost three years later.
The concept jumped early on in the bandwagon.
Two weeks before ChATGPT hit the market, the productivity software startup announced its own artificial intelligence capabilities using the OpenAI model. Concept AI is designed to be a “writing assistant” that can help users brainstorm, edit and summarise, the company said.
“We are at an important inflection point,” CEO Ivan Zao wrote in a blog post at the time. “The possibilities of artificial intelligence will grow exponentially and continue to grow.”
AI Wave pushes the concept to more than $500 million in annual revenue. The company now spoke to CNBC and ranked 34th on the 2025 Disruptor 50 list. It landed on Thursday as the concept launched a customizable agent and launched a customizable agent that can use models such as Openai and Anthropic to draw data from many sources.
Notion co-founder and operating chief Akshay Kothari said in an interview that the company is competing to keep up with corporate demand for AI tools. Corporate clients include Kaiser Permanente, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and nvidia And Volvo’s car.
“We’ve doubled this year and we’re likely to double our sales team next year,” Kotari said. He added that around 90% of the business comes from “using multiplayer” or from worker teams.
The concept was founded in 2013, two years before Openai was created as a non-profit AI lab. The company, which currently employs around 1,000 people, launched the first version of its product in 2016, with more than 100 million users.
However, unlike most startups that have been caught up in the rise of generator AI, the concept has not lifted external capital for a long time. The recent funding round took place in 2021, when a large-scale driver of cloud-based collaboration software was working for Covid Pandemic and Remote. In October of that year, the concept raised $275 million at a valuation of $10 billion.
Kothari says the company has more cash on hand than the $330 million it has been raised so far.
In May, the concept introduced AI products to summarise meetings and search corporate files. Kotari said annual revenue growth is accelerating monthly but refused to provide growth rates.
Thursday’s announcement includes a preview of an additional feature called Custom Agents that allow you to perform actions in the background. As an example, a custom agent can instruct each week to create and submit a list of articles related to a person’s interests.
Kothari said last year that between 10% and 20% of concept customers are paying for AI add-ons. It reached up to 30% or 40% earlier this year, and has recently surpassed 50%, he said.
At that point, the company has begun to include AI in its business and enterprise plans without charging an additional fee, adding that it is talking to clients about a fair pricing model for custom agents.
Productivity software is a highly competitive space Microsoft and Google In the center.
A few weeks after the massive funding round of concepts in 2021, Microsoft announced Loop, an app for working on documentation. Concept-like products were available in 2023 to organizations with Microsoft 365 Productivity Software subscriptions.
Microsoft is also pushing Copilot, an AI assistant that can spew word documentation and Outlook emails. Meanwhile, Google offers Gemini AI options for the Google Workspace application.
RAMP, a business credit card startup, pays for the Gemini AI option in the Google Workspace app. However, the company is encouraging people to migrate documents and move projects tracking into concepts, Ben Levik, Lamp’s operations director, said in an email.
Levick said nine out of RAMP’s 10 employees have 1,200 employees and now uses Notion’s AI capabilities monthly, and the company is connecting its upcoming products that can test custom agents to answer internal inquiries and handle sales feedback with client requests.
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