Is Evernote the next billion-dollar company?
Talk of a $100 million funding round for the note-taking company places it at a $1 billion valuation, according to a report.
Evernote, which makes a popular app for taking and keeping notes, has raised a $100 million round of funding led by Meritech, according to a Business Insider story.
The story reports that the funding round would value Evernote at $1 billion. TechCrunch counters that the round has not closed and that the numbers may end up being different. Everynote has raised $95.5 million to date in four venture rounds; the last was $50 million.
Evernote reports 20 million users of its product over several major computing platforms: Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, and others. The product is sold in the U.S. on the freemium model; it's free to use, with some features and capacity limits raised for paying customers. In Japan, where Evernote is also popular, it is also sold in retail stores.
No news yet of what Evernote would do with the extra funding. However, competition in the note-taking space is accelerating. Apps like Catch are aiming to compete with Evernote. A Kickstarter project, Scrawl 2, highlights what some see as a weakness in Evernote: a design that is struggling a bit under its growing list of features.
Evernote is also experimenting with other products, some of which come from acquisitions. It has launched a contact manager (Hello), a food tracker (Food), and a Web site readability enhancer (Clearly). It acquired the graphics utility Skitch.