❯ Notion passes $600 million in ARR and plans to grow headcount about 30% this year

growth and a soft spotPer an in-depth report from The Information, Notion’s ARR has passed $600 million and the company plans to increase headcount by roughly 30% this year as CEO Ivan Zhao pushes deeper into AI. The other half of the same report: mobile usage is stalling.

where the money goesPer public data, the comparable figure in 2024 was about $300 million, a doubling in a year. Hiring spans engineering and AI roles, product management, go-to-market, and recruiting itself — that last item saying the expansion is more urgent than routine backfilling. Zhao holds roughly 30% of a company that has raised more than $615 million, an unusually large founder stake, which means bets like this do not require repeatedly convincing a board.

the mobile problemThe stalled mobile side is the part of this report worth watching. Notion’s AI features center on long documents, databases and multi-step operations — precisely the shapes a phone screen carries worst. That leaves the AI path for collaboration software with an unresolved structural problem: the stronger the desktop gets, the more the mobile app becomes a read-only window. For product teams in the same category, this is a pit that can be avoided early. Watch whether Notion builds a separate lightweight AI surface for mobile.

▪ SIGNALThe deeper the AI goes on desktop, the thinner the other half of the product gets on phones — the question collaboration software cannot dodge.