Notion Acquires Skiff

When Notion released its Calendar app, I quipped that it should buy an email app next and release an office productivity suite. Well, it looks like they took that as serious advice: Notion is acquiring Skiff, a company whose primary offering is a cross-platform, privacy-focused email app.

“Skiff’s mission is to bring freedom to the internet by helping people collaborate and communicate with confidence and privacy,” a message on Skiff’s homepage reads. “We see a deep alignment with Notion’s vision to build a connected workspace and enable everyone to build tools that reflect their values and protect their privacy. We’re extremely excited to accelerate this mission by joining forces with Notion’s world-class team and we are pursuing big plans for making all of our online lives freer and more empowered.”

Neither company is providing any details about this acquisition: Notion has published an interview with Skiff’s co-founders and Skiff has only updated its home page. But it’s unclear how the privacy-focused Skiff will fit in with Notion, given that two of its products, Skiff Pages and Skiff Calendar, duplicate functionality already supplied by Notion’s own apps. Beyond those, Skiff also makes the aforementioned email app—Skiff Mail, which does plug an obvious hole in Notion’s products, plus a cloud storage service called Skiff Drive.

It looks like these Skiff offerings are all standalone apps on mobile and integrated all-in-one apps on desktop, meaning that there is a single Skiff app for Windows (and Mac). Which is what I had wanted Notion to do with Notion Calendar.

Given how long it took Notion to bring Notion Calendar to market—it acquired Cron almost two years earlier—it’s not clear how long it will take to integrate Skiff and its products into the company. But here we do see the makings of a modern office productivity suite that can possibly challenge Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and the like. Interesting.