Why we raised $4.4M

Today marks an exciting day for Slite! We've raised $4.4M in a seed round led by Index Ventures alongside eFounders and Y Combinator. Successful French entrepreneurs such as Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia) also participated in the round. We feel incredibly grateful to work alongside these talented partners and to be part of this rich network.

18 months: from 1 to 9, Y Combinator and $4.4M

This milestone feels like a good time to look back at where we were 1.5 years ago and where we're headed next.

Slite was called NoteX, the team was just Chris and most of all, there was no product. Soon, the team grew and realized that the potential of NoteX went far beyond building a note app for teams. It was the opportunity to rethink document collaboration from the ground up and create new habits in the ways teams share knowledge and content.

A year later, we were a team of five, launched out of our private beta and had an entry ticket to the prestigious Y Combinator. Before we could wrap our heads around all of it, we grew the team to eight people, packed our bags and headed to the Silicon Valley. The nuttiest part: in the midst of all this craziness, we also raised our first round of $4.4M.

For the past three months at Y Combinator we've accelerated our growth and product development—a pretty exhilarating way to kick the year off. We actually wrote about our experience at Y Combinator on several occasions, from applying, settling into the rhythm, how we organized our weeks, to the inevitable challenges.

As a young startup, the past 18 months have been dedicated to juggling between building a product that teams need (and love) all the while crafting Slite's long term vision. By far, the most gratifying achievements have been building our team and putting Slite in the hands of its very first users. Today, 3500+ people and 300+ teams use Slite weekly to write all their content and knowledge. Big thanks to all of them—we cannot express how crucial your feedback and support have been.

So, what's next?

The great news is that we have loads more to achieve. Beyond the amount of this seed round, what we're most pumped about is pursuing our vision. For this to happen, we're scaling product, acquisition model and team. All three of which will contribute directly to Slite users.

#1 - Bring Slite to the next level

From early on, we built Slite to solve knowledge sharing in teams by giving them a user-friendly tool focused on making writing, organizing and collaborating on content simple. By talking with our users, we've consolidated the foundations of Slite and achieved a high retention rate. Still, we're just getting started and our roadmap is incredibly ambitious.

This funding will allow the Slite team to focus on developing a public API. We're going from a product to a platform that integrates with our users' entire workflow. We believe teams should be able to push and access their knowledge in Slite anywhere in their workflows. That's not all though: we're also heads down on the mobile app launch.

#2 - Tell the world about Slite

On the more business side of things, we'll be focusing on our long term acquisition model. We want to—and know we can—change the way teams write and organize content but for this to happen, we need to continue spreading the word about Slite! This goal is essential in guaranteeing our growth and success.

#3 - Grow the team, of course!

Perhaps the most crucial bit: we're hiring! For the two above goals to become a reality, we're growing the team and are on the lookout for the best.

If you believe one of these is you, please apply via the links in the job descriptions. We're excited to hear from you!

The market we're facing is huge and this seed round is an opportunity to change the way teams write and share documents and, ultimately, how they collaborate. But most of all, this funding will allow us to bring Slite up to the standard of our users' expectations and needs.

Stay tuned, we're just getting started 🌈