Notion is now valued in the tens of billions of dollars and used by well over 100 million people — but in the spring of 2015, it was a four-person team, nearly out of money, building a product almost nobody wanted, on the verge of shutting down entirely. The company’s actual path to its current scale runs directly through that near-death moment, not around it.

The founding, and the version that almost killed the company

Notion was founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, alongside early collaborators Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, and Toby Schachman, launching with just four employees and a modest $2 million in seed funding. The original product was built on CouchDB with a heavy WebKit-based client, and it crashed often — a genuinely unstable foundation for a tool meant for daily use. The deeper problem wasn’t just technical instability, though: Zhao has since described the original version as built for “nerdy tech crowds,” on the assumption that people actually wanted to build their own custom apps. They didn’t. What people actually wanted, it turned out, was something built around familiar, comfortable formats — notes and documents — with genuine power hidden underneath, not surfaced as a blank canvas requiring real technical effort to use.

The Kyoto rebuild

By 2015, that mismatch between what Notion had built and what people actually wanted had become an existential problem. Zhao and Last laid off their team, moved to Kyoto, Japan, and rebuilt the entire product from scratch, funded by a $150,000 loan from Zhao’s mother — not venture capital, a family loan, at the company’s lowest point. The two of them spent the summer of 2015 coding roughly 18 hours a day in a two-story house with paper walls and no heating, in a city where neither of them spoke the local language and no one around them spoke English. It’s a genuinely stripped-down origin story for a company now worth tens of billions — no safety net, no team, just two founders and a loan from a parent.

The specific creative influence on the rebuild is well-documented and unusual for a software company: immersed in Kyoto’s craftsmanship culture — pottery, ceramics, soba-noodle artisans — Zhao and Last absorbed a specific philosophy from that tradition of master craftsmanship: pay attention to every detail, and design around the user, not around what’s technically impressive to build. That philosophy shaped the rebuilt Notion directly, trading the original version’s blank-canvas, build-your-own-app ambition for a more restrained, document-and-notes-first interface with real underlying flexibility, rather than requiring it upfront.

From a two-person rebuild to a genuine funding trajectory

The rebuild worked, and the funding history since traces a real, escalating trajectory rather than one single breakout moment: a $10 million Series A in 2019, a $50 million Series B in April 2020 that valued the company at $2 billion — a fivefold valuation increase in eighteen months — and a $275 million Series C in October 2021, led by Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital with Base10 Partners participating, at a $10 billion valuation. Total funding raised across the company’s history sits at roughly $344 million. By 2025, Notion had crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue with more than 100 million users, and a January 2026 employee tender offer valued the company at $11 billion.

What’s happening right now: a confidential IPO filing at $18.5 billion

Notion’s story has kept moving even more recently than most case studies of this kind can usually report: the company confidentially filed an S-1 for a public offering on February 12, 2026, reportedly targeting a valuation around $18.5 billion — a genuinely current, still-unfolding chapter, not a settled historical outcome. Ivan Zhao has retained an estimated 30% economic ownership stake as of the most recent disclosures, making him the single largest known individual shareholder — meaning the founder who rebuilt the company from a two-person team in a paper-walled house in Kyoto still holds the largest personal stake in whatever a public listing at that valuation would actually be worth.

The actual takeaway

Notion’s story isn’t simply “small team builds huge company” — it’s a small team that built the wrong product first, nearly ran out of money and people entirely, and only reached its current scale by being willing to throw away years of work and rebuild from a fundamentally different, more disciplined design philosophy, funded at its lowest point by a founder’s own family rather than outside investors. The $18.5 billion IPO valuation being discussed now isn’t the story of steady, uninterrupted growth from 2013 onward — it’s the story of a near-total restart in 2015 that actually worked, which is a meaningfully different, and more instructive, lesson than the smoother version of this story usually gets told as.

See Notion’s full company profile on Talmyn.