Open source Notion alternative AppFlowy gets big-name backers and lands on the cloud
Summary
A new startup is targeting the lucrative workplace productivity space with an open source approach to project and knowledge management -- and it has received backing from a whos who of investors from across the technology spectrum.AppFlowy, as the company is called, has raised $6.4 million in funding from a slew of renowned founders, including Matt Mullenweg (Automattic); Steve Chen (YouTube); Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub); Bob Young (Red Hat) and Amr Awadallah (Cloudera). The seed round was led by OSS Capital.Helping the workforce be more efficient is big business, evidenced by the likes of Notion hitting a lofty $10 billion valuation off the back of remote work-driven demand for collaboration software. However, as proprietary software, businesses -- particularly enterprises -- might be hesitant to go all-in on a technology they dont have full control of.And this, essentially, is what AppFlowy is seeking to address with a self-hostable solution that goes some way toward addressing security and extensibility concerns with the incumbent providers.Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, AppFlowy includes tools for managing projects, taking notes, tracking the status of individual project items, viewing deadlines and creating documents, among other things that might be familiar to those that use similar virtual workspace tools.However, AppFlowys promise is all about control and customizability, allowing companies to tailor their workspace with modular building blocks that can be fine-tuned for specific use cases. "Most proprietary collaboration workplace tools share a major limitation -- their customers find it too hard or too expensive to have 100% control of their data," co-founder and CEO Annie Anqi Wang said in a blog post. "We plan to adopt a freemium model for AppFlowy Cloud, which means that certain premium features will not be included in the free tier," Wang said.