Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff

Notion launched its new calendar based on Cron last month, but its productivity suit can soon have more privacy-focused offerings. The company announced today that it has acquired Skiff, a platform that offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events, and email.

Skiff was started in 2020 by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg. The company had raised $14.2 million in funding over two rounds from investors such as Sequoia Capital along with Alphabet chairman John Hennessy, former Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang, and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz, Balaji Srinivasan, and re–Inc founder Jenny Wang.

Image Credits: Skiff

In a conversation with co-founders posted on the Notion blog, the company’s COO Akshay Kothari said that Notion had taken note of Skiff’s work right from the start.

“Skiff started showing up on our radar at Notion right from the beginning. I actually tried to reach out in 2020 when you were building your Docs product. We never connected then, but I kept tabs on your progress. Then a few months ago, Ivan [Notion co-foudner] and I were talking, and Skiff came up again. I downloaded all the products y’all had built, and was really impressed by the attention to detail,” Kothari said.

While the company started out as a secure alternative to Google Docs, it also built other productivity solutions such as calendar and email.

Skiff mentioned on its website that the company is joining Notion. On a support page, the Skiff said that the product would shut down after six months. It mentioned that the Skiff user account won’t be converted to a Notion account. Plus, users can easily export or migrate their data to other services.

Notion’s last acquisition was the workflow management tool Flowdash in 2022. Prior to that, it acquired Cron and India-based Automate.io, which had a suite of integrations with 200 services.