Work collaboration company Notion acquires Hyderabad-based Automate io

Work collaboration company Notion has acquired integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) firm Automate.io in a cash and stock deal.

The San Francisco-based company will absorb Hyderabad-based Automate.io’s entire 40-member team, which will continue to operate in the city.



Six-year-old Automate.io was founded by Ashok Gudibandla, who will lead Notion’s India team in his new role.

Notion, which was valued at more than $2 billion last year, has witnessed 5x growth in weekly active users in the last 18 months globally, and 8x in India.

This comes on the back of remote work taking hold amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Notion’s clients include startups like Unacademy, Byju’s and Cred in India as well as Nike, Samsung, and Pixar globally.

The acquisition will meet the growing customer demand to connect to other tools like GitHub and Salesforce, Notion said.

India is a key market for growth and talent, Notion’s chief operating officer Akshay Kothari told ET.

“It's an incredible story for India SaaS. This company that is mostly bootstrapped and very low key, has built the best product that we've seen in the market,” Kothari, who was head of LinkedIn India’s operations till 2018, said. “We're sort of short term focused on integrating the Automate technology inside Notion, but long term, we're excited to invest more in India.”

Hyderabad will become Notion's fifth global office, joining existing locations in Dublin, Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco.

It will be Notion's first engineering hub outside of the United States, where the company will continue hiring engineering talent.

“India is a really important market for us. This acquisition sort of accelerates our platform work, but it also gives us an amazing engineering centre in Hyderabad. So far, engineering has only been in San Francisco and New York. So, this will be our first engineering centre outside the US,” Kothari said.

Notion is looking to tap into India’s developer community and chart a robust go-to-market strategy for the country.

“We have startups and large companies using it, but I think there's a lot we can do here in terms of providing better support and onboarding to all the sort of upcoming startups, there's a lot we can do on the ground in terms of just go to market,” he said.

The company’s long-term mission was to allow developers to build their own software tools on Notion, he added.