Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff

Notion launched a new Cron-based calendar last month, but its productivity suite will soon offer more privacy-focused products. The company today announced the acquisition of Skiff, a platform that provides end-to-end encrypted file storage, documents, calendar events and email.

Skiff was founded in 2020 by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg. The company has raised $14.2 million in two rounds of funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy, former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz. Balaji Srinivasan and re-Inc founder Jenny Wang.

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In a conversation with the co-founders posted on the Notion blog, Akshay Kothari, the company’s chief operating officer, said Notion had noticed Skiff’s work from the beginning.

“Skiff has been on our Notion radar from the beginning. I actually tried to reach out to you when you were building the Docs product in 2020. We had never been in contact at that time, but I followed your progress closely . Then a few months ago, Ivan [Notion co-foudner] While I was talking, Skiff showed up again. I downloaded all the products you made and was impressed with the attention to detail,” Kothari said.

While the company started out as a secure alternative to Google Docs, it has also built other productivity solutions, such as calendaring and email.

Skiff mentioned on its website that the company is joining Notion. We’ve reached out to Notion for clarification on whether Skiff will disappear as a product.

Notion’s last acquisition was workflow management tool Flowdash in 2022. Before that, it acquired Cron and India’s Automate.io, which has an integrated suite of 200 services.