How to Buy Notion Stock While it's Still a Private Company

There is no shortage of productivity and information management tools. However, in my experience, none offer the same level of flexibility and intuitiveness as Notion.

These characteristics, coupled with the product's elegant design, have helped make it popular with enthusiastic users.

Notion is primarily used by individuals — nearly 100 million of them, to be exact. It's also used by enterprises for company-wide documentation and project collaboration.

Forbes estimates that Notion made $250 million in revenue last year. And Notion's popularity was not missed by investors, who valued the company at $10 billion in October 2021.

Read on to learn how you can invest in Notion, too.

Can you buy Notion stock?

Notion is still a private company. There is no Notion stock symbol and no way to buy it in your traditional brokerage account. However, its shares are available on Hiive.

Hiive is an investment marketplace where accredited investors can buy shares of private, VC-backed companies.

Accreditation requirements

To qualify as an accredited investor, you must meet one of the following criteria:

• Have an annual income of $200,000 individually or $300,000 jointly.
• Have a net worth that exceeds $1,000,000, excluding your main residence.
• Be a qualifying financial professional.

There are over 2,000 pre-IPO companies with shares available on Hiive, including OpenAI, SpaceX, and Notion:

Notion shares are currently trading for $22.31 on Hiive. At the time of this writing, there are two listings of Notion available for purchase.

Each of these listings was created by a unique seller who sets the asking price and quantity of shares available. Sellers are typically current or former employees, venture capitalists, or angel investors.

After creating a free account, buyers can see every bid and ask for each company listed on Hiive. From there, buyers can accept a seller's asking price as listed or place bids and negotiate.

Buyers can also add stocks to their watchlists and get notifications of any new listings or transactions.

You can get started on Hiive with the button below:

Register for Hiive

Can retail investors buy Notion stock?

No, retail investors cannot buy Notion stock while it's still a private company. You will have to wait until the company has its IPO to buy shares. More on that below.

In the meantime, you may be interested in some of Notion's publicly traded competitors. Here are a few options:

• Asana (ASAN) is a project management and collaboration platform with a focus on enterprise clients. Its tools allow users within an organization to see progress being made across a variety of projects at a glance.
• Atlassian (TEAM) provides a suite of collaboration tools, including Jira (a help ticket software), Trello (a project management software), Loom (a video communication tool), and Confluence (an information management software). It primarily sells to enterprises.
• Smartsheet (SMAR) provides an enterprise platform to plan, manage, automate, and report on work completed among teams. Smartsheet primarily focuses on providing information on how an organization is spending its time.
• Microsoft (MSFT) is a technology giant with a number of productivity and note-taking tools. Microsoft Teams, OneNote, and SharePoint enable cross-team communication, note-taking and information storage, and project management. Microsoft Loop has also been called a Notion copycat.
• Alphabet (GOOGL), the parent company of Google, offers a range of productivity tools including Google Docs, Sheets, and Keep. However, Google doesn't monetize any of these tools — they are free for anyone with a Google account.
• Box (BOX) is a cloud content management and file-sharing service. While its focus is on secure content management, it also offers some collaboration tools such as Box Notes, which enables users to share notes on secured files.
  

Notion also competes with a number of other private companies including Airtable, Coda, ClickUp, Evernote, and Obsidian.

When compared to these tools, Notion stands out for its unique blend of note-taking capabilities, database management, and project collaboration.

When will Notion have its IPO?

The company has made no indication of any plans to become publicly traded.

Its last fundraising round came back in October 2021, about three years ago. This is a relatively long time for a private company to go between rounds, so we can reasonably assume the business is at least close to breaking even.

That is further supported by some reports that suggest the company may be extremely profitable and has been that way since 2016.

Matt MacInnis, the founder of Inkling and an investor in Notion, also said in an interview about Ivan Zhao (the founder and CEO of Notion) in April 2024:

“Notion is a manifestation of his value system and his urge to create. That's why he doesn't want to sell the company. I can't imagine he even wants to go public.”

Time will tell.

Who founded Notion?

Notion was co-founded by Ivan Zhao (CEO), Simon Last, and Akshay Kothari in 2016, though its story started earlier.

In 2013, Zhao and Last raised $2 million in seed funding to build a more flexible word processor. Their idea was to build a product that looked similar to Google Docs but also allowed users to create content wikis, build databases, and manage to-do lists.

However, by the summer of 2015, the pair was almost out of money.

To stretch what little funding they had left, they laid off their entire staff, sublet their office in San Francisco, and moved to Japan. Zhao's mother gave them a $150,000 loan, which gave them enough time to launch Notion 1.0.

Shortly thereafter, in August 2016, Notion was launched on Product Hunt (a website for launching new products). It went viral. Within weeks, Notion was turning a profit. Zhao and Last returned to San Francisco just two months later.

The company announced it had reached 1 million users in September 2019. Two years later, Notion had 20 million users. Today, that number is closer to 100 million.

How much is Notion worth?

In October 2021, Notion raised $275 million at a $10 billion valuation in its Series C.

The round was led by Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital. Base10 Partners also participated.

While Notion hasn't raised another round since then, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures participated in a secondary transaction in July 2022, where they purchased shares directly from Notion employees at the same $10 billion valuation.

To date, Notion has raised $330 million over three rounds. Here's a look at how its valuation has changed at each round:

The company received valuations of $800 million in July 2019 (Series A) and $1.95 billion in April 2020 (Series B).

Zhao, the founder and CEO of Notion, is estimated to still own at least 30% of the company.