Goodnotes, a London-based note-taking startup, said today that it is acquiring South Korean startup Dropthebit, which operates a meeting and video summary tool called Traw. With the acquisition, Goodnotes seeks to go beyond the classroom and explore creating productivity tools for professionals.
As part of the deal, Dropthebit's three co-founders will move to Goodnotes. Additionally, Traw said on his website that his tool will close in February but will allow existing customers to export their data.
Dropthebit, which was founded in 2020 and had raised $1 million to date, began by launching a whiteboard solution in 2022. The tool recorded activities on the whiteboard during a conference or meeting. In addition, he summarized the meeting in a document for later consumption. Last year, Traw removed the whiteboard feature, focused on meeting summary, and added a tool powered by artificial intelligence to summarize and organize YouTube videos.
Goodnotes founder Steven Chan said Dropthebit was looking to raise its Series A funding. And while Goodnotes considered both the investment and the acquisition, it ultimately opted for the latter.
“Even before we met Dropthebit through a mutual connection with investors, we were very impressed by their work. The multimodality of it was something we were interested in and we saw it as a good synergy with Goodnotes,” Chan said.
Goodnotes, which has more than 24 million monthly active users, has focused on providing a digital notebook-like solution for students over the years, starting with an iPad app in 2011. As of August 2023, the startup launched Goodnotes 6 with a digital marketplace for planners. and topic-specific review notes. In addition, it launched paid educational modules for students, including SAT math practice courses and English and Chinese courses for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) exam.
With its latest acquisition, Goodnotes intends to enter the productivity sector aimed at professionals. Chan said Traw's functionality, such as analyzing videos and placing them in an Excel sheet, could be useful for professional segments such as investors and market researchers, as the company looks to go beyond the education sector.
“We already have audio recording in Goodnotes, but with the integration of Traw, we will look towards the transcription business and later we will also integrate YouTube support or internal videos of a company. On the other hand, we are also creating features based on LLM (Large Language Model) so that users can ask questions about notes or meetings,” Chan said.
Goodnotes said it plans to be a “paperless digital notebook” for professionals, trying to help them get more information from meetings and documents. Currently, Goodnotes focuses more on handwritten stylus notes. The startup said it is already improving its typing experience across the board to make it property for different ways to take notes.
In addition to acquiring Dropthebit, in September 2023, the note-taking company invested $1,9 million in Korea-based digital stationary startup WeBudding. However, Goodnotes, which raised a $6 million seed investment from Race Capital in 2020, is not looking to raise another round.
“I feel like we are very profitable. For now, we do not have any fundraising plans. We like the flexibility of focusing on the user experience and creating the product. So we plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future,” Chan said.
Alfred S. Chuang, general partner at Race Capital, said he is excited about Goodnotes' move into the productivity space.
“I am excited about this acquisition of Goodnotes. The Traw team is very talented and has excellent engineering and Artificial Intelligence. They will create AI-powered screen and audio recording capabilities in Goodnotes,” Chuang said.
“It makes sense to me to expand Goodnotes into new use cases that integrate Goodnotes into different business workflows. Their challenge is that they will have to continue their growth without sacrificing the user experience.”
