Notion is acquiring calendar app Cron, the note-taking platform announced Thursday. Notion already allowed for a two-way sync with Google Calendar, but now Notion will have a scheduling app of its own.
"Time is a fundamental layer of software and our daily workflows," co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao wrote in a Notion blog post.
Digital calendaring is a hot space, with startups like Calendly, Clockwise and Fantastical competing to make time-tracking and scheduling less of a headache. Cron is fresh on the scene, raising a seed round of $3.5 million in 2020 and rolling out its beta in 2021. It looks like your standard calendar app, but leverages keyboard shortcuts to quickly create and schedule events. Cron was ranked product of the month in November 2021 on Product Hunt.
It's not uncommon for bigger tech companies to buy popular startup calendar apps. Who can forget Sunrise, an early geek favorite until it was swallowed up by Microsoft in 2015.
Notion's influence in the productivity space exploded in 2020 and has since been growing steadily. It reached $10 billion valuation after raising $275 million in October of last year, led by Sequoia and Coatue. In September, the company acquired Indian startup Automate.io to expand its integration efforts. The acquisition of Cron shows Notion's ambitions to become even more of an all-in-one workspace.
"The first thing many people do in the morning is check their calendar," Notion's blog post reads. "It anchors the day, paints a picture of what’s ahead, and keeps track of how we spend our most precious resource: time."
Cron co-founder and CEO Raphael Schaad expressed his excitement to be partnering with Notion, though he reassured Cron fans that the calendar will still exist as a separate app. "We’ll work with Notion to bring the two products closer together to unlock powerful workflows," he wrote in a blog post. "The two apps side by side is already a common sight among our users."
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE