- Notion surpassed 100 million users in 2024 and crossed $500 million in annualized revenue in 2025, with AI features driving half that figure.
- Ivan Zhao grew up in Xinjiang, China, moved to Vancouver as a teenager, and studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia.
- In 2015, Zhao and co-founder Simon Last moved to Kyoto, Japan after running out of money, scrapped their entire codebase, and rebuilt Notion from scratch in a cold apartment with paper walls.
- Notion 3.0 launched in September 2025 with autonomous AI agents, positioning the company for a potential IPO valued north of $11 billion.
Over 100 million people organize their work, notes, and projects inside Notion. The all-in-one productivity tool generates more than $500 million in annual revenue, employs roughly 1,000 people, and carries a valuation above $10 billion. Its AI-powered agents now automate tasks across databases, pages, and third-party integrations for companies ranging from two-person startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.
The person who built all of this is Ivan Zhao — a designer-turned-CEO who once borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the company alive. His path from a small city in northwestern China to Silicon Valley’s most valuable productivity company is one of the more unlikely founder stories in tech.
A Boy From Xinjiang Who Learned to Code Before He Learned English
Zhao grew up with his mother in Urumqi, a city of four million in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He started coding young, competing in the International Olympiad in Informatics while still in grade school. He also studied traditional Chinese watercolor painting — a discipline that would quietly shape his obsession with aesthetics and craft.
When he was a teenager, his mother decided he needed a better education and moved the family to Vancouver. Zhao learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants. At the University of British Columbia, he skipped computer science — figuring he already knew enough — and instead studied cognitive science with a minor in fine art, picking up photography along the way.
From Inkling to an Idea That Wouldn’t Let Go
After graduating, Zhao moved to San Francisco and landed a product design role at Inkling, an education technology startup. The job taught him how teams build software — and how badly most tools served the people using them.
At Inkling, he spent time studying the history of computing, from Douglas Engelbart’s vision of augmenting human intellect to Alan Kay’s early graphical interfaces. The deeper he dug, the more he saw a gap: software had become a sprawl of disconnected apps, each doing one thing. Nobody was building the flexible, modular workspace that would let ordinary people assemble their own tools without writing code.
”Instead of building another specialized tool, we wanted to build a set of LEGO-style software blocks — pages, databases, bulleted lists, embeds — that would let anyone in the world build their own tools to solve any problem they have.” — Ivan Zhao
San Francisco, 2013: Two Founders and a Vision Too Big for Its Own Good
In 2013, Zhao co-founded Notion Labs with Simon Last in San Francisco. The ambition was enormous — an all-in-one workspace where documents, databases, wikis, and project management lived in one product. The kind of tool that replaced a dozen SaaS subscriptions.
But ambition without execution is just a pitch deck. By 2015, the company had burned through its seed funding — money raised from family and friends — and the product wasn’t working. The engineering choices had painted them into a corner. Zhao laid off the team. Notion was, by every practical measure, dead.
Kyoto, 2015: Paper Walls, No Heating, and One Last Shot
With almost nothing left, Zhao and Last made a radical decision. They moved to Kyoto, Japan — where the cost of living was half that of San Francisco — and decided to rewrite Notion’s entire codebase from scratch. The apartment had paper walls and no heating. Neither of them spoke Japanese. Nobody around them spoke English.
They worked 18-hour days, stripped of distractions and expectations. Zhao borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep things going. The isolation forced a clarity that San Francisco never could. Everything that wasn’t essential got cut.
”The goal isn’t to add things. It’s to remove everything that shouldn’t be there until what’s left is inevitable.” — Ivan Zhao
In March 2016, they shipped Notion 1.0. It was lean, elegant, and unlike anything else on the market.
Product-Led Growth and the Rise of a Cult Following
Notion didn’t raise a Series A until 2019, when revenue sat at roughly $3 million. The company grew almost entirely through word of mouth and a passionate community of power users who built templates, tutorials, and workflows — all without Notion spending on marketing.
That organic flywheel turned into a rocket. Revenue jumped from $3 million in 2019 to $13 million in 2020, then $31 million in 2021. Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management led a $275 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation in October 2021. Zhao kept the team deliberately small — under 400 employees even as the user base exploded past 30 million.
”It feels good when someone makes a living selling Notion templates without writing code. That’s the mission.” — Ivan Zhao
The community didn’t just use Notion. They built businesses on top of it. Template creators, consultants, and educators turned the platform into a cottage industry — proof that Zhao’s LEGO-block vision had landed exactly where he intended.
$500 Million in Revenue and an AI Bet That Changes Everything
By 2025, Notion had crossed $500 million in annualized revenue and 100 million users worldwide. But Zhao wasn’t content to ride the productivity wave. He saw AI as a fundamental shift in what software could be — not just a feature bolted onto existing products.
In September 2025, Notion launched version 3.0 with autonomous AI agents capable of multi-step work, scheduled automations, and MCP connectors that integrate with external tools. AI now accounts for roughly half of Notion’s revenue. Earlier that year, Notion released Notion Mail, an AI-powered Gmail client that brought its intelligence layer to email.
The company’s valuation climbed to $11 billion. Market observers expect an IPO filing within the next 18 months, with projections suggesting $1 billion in ARR could support a public market cap north of $15 billion.
The Designer Who Wants Software to Disappear
Zhao still thinks like a designer, not a CEO. He talks about craft the way a woodworker talks about grain — with reverence for the material and impatience with anything that wastes it. His north star remains Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 vision of computers as tools that augment human intellect, not replace it.
The next chapter is already taking shape. Notion is building a standalone AI chat product and rolling out developer-facing features that position it as an operating system for work — not just a note-taking app that got big. Zhao’s bet is clear: if your product can’t be used by AI agents, it won’t survive the decade.
From a cold apartment in Kyoto to a company used by 100 million people, Zhao’s story is one of radical conviction. He scrapped a product, rewrote it from nothing, borrowed money from his mother, and refused to build anything less than what he envisioned. Notion is what happened when a designer decided that software should be beautiful, flexible, and — eventually — inevitable.
