The competitors for note-taking is as fierce because it has ever been with loads of highly-valued productiveness startups preventing for an viewers it might probably probably serve infinite productiveness offshoots. In the previous yr, Notion raised at a $2 billion valuation, Coda raised at $636 million, and Roam raised at $200 million.
A brand new competitor within the house is rising out of stealth with recent funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The free app, known as Mem, is an early entry platform devoted to pushing customers to rapidly jot down their ideas with out focusing too closely on the underlying group of them. The startup’s founders have huge ambitions for what their platform may grow to be down the street, tapping into additional advances in machine studying and even AR.
“Really the differentiation is [information] that is summonable ubiquitously wherever you are,” Mem co-founder Kevin Moody tells TechCrunch. “So, in the near term, through your desktop app with Mem Spotlight as a heads-up display for wherever you are, in the medium term through an assistive mobile application, and then in the long term, imagine contact lenses that are overlaying useful content to you in the world.”
Moody and his co-founder Dennis Xu inform TechCrunch they’ve raised $5.6 million in a seed spherical led by a16z with further participation from their Cultural Leadership Fund, Will Smith’s dreamers.vc, Floodgate, Unusual Ventures and Shrug Capital. The spherical additionally was host to a handful of angel traders together with Harry Stebbings, Julia Lipton, Tony Liu, Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, amongst others.
In its present iteration, Mem push customers in the direction of “lightweight organization” reasonably than clicking via folders and hyperlinks to seek out the proper place to nestle their ideas. Users can rapidly tag customers or devoted subjects of their notes. The person workflow depends fairly closely on search and chronological group, presenting customers with their most not too long ago accessed notes. Users may also set reminders for sure notes, bringing a well-liked electronic mail framework to note-taking.
For customers of inventory apps like Apple Notes, these interface quirks might not sound very jarring, although the design continues to be a departure from apps like Notion and Airtable which have closely centered on construction over immediacy.
Mem Spotlight
Perhaps Mem’s largest shift is how customers entry the data they’ve dumped into the platform. The founders say they wish to keep away from their app being seen as a “destination,” as an alternative hoping customers rely closely on a keyboard-shortcut-prompted overlay known as Mem Spotlight that permits them to look out data that they might want for an electronic mail, presentation or textual content message. The broader hope of the founders and traders behind Mem is that the crew can leverage the platform’s intelligence over time to raised perceive the information dump from your mind — and certain different data sources throughout your digital footprint — to know you higher than any advert community or social media graph does.
“What would it mean to just capture passively your digital footprint and then make use of that as though it were structured,” Moody posits. “If we can actually have our own Mem modeling of all of these entities, whether it’s text, or maybe it’s contacts, the people that you know, or it’s the events that you’re going to and these different sources feed into Mem, what would it mean for Mem to be able to have a product that is the ‘you’ API?”
For now, the startup’s app isn’t fairly as grandiose in scale as what the founders might even see in its future, however as Mem continues to onboard early customers from its waitlist and add to its desktop performance, the corporate is driving in the direction of a platform they hope feels extra instrumental to how its customers “remember” data.
