Goodnotes Acquires Korean AI Startup, Dropthebit, to Accelerate Development of AI Features

Goodnotes, the leading digital paper app, has announced that it has acquired Dropthebit, the creators ofTraw, a service that automatically organizes meeting, lecture, and video content into summarized notes and videos. Following the acquisition, Traw’s generative AI technology will be further enhanced and adopted into the Goodnotes platform.

Since its launch in 2020, Traw has focused its efforts on using technology to automate notes creation, both for a user’s own materials and for the content they find online. Following a seed investment led by Capstone Partners and KB Investment, Dropthebit launched Traw’s initial offering, Traw Whiteboard, in 2022. This smart digital whiteboard for lectures and meetings automatically recorded when a user spoke or drew on the board. Traw then automatically edited the video into meeting minutes with subtitles and distilled the video into a document for easy reading and editing. Last May, the company introduced Traw AI, a tool that automatically organized and summarized YouTube video content. Traw AI could create short video or textual summaries and even extract key information from videos into a table format, transforming the research process.

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While this comes as Goodnotes’ first acquisition, this is not the company’s first venture in investment aimed at accelerating improvements to the overall user experience. In late 2023, Goodnotes invested $1.9M into South Korea’s largest digital stationery platform, WeBudding. This strategic investment was the first within a larger initiative to partner with rising startups that offer technology or services that complements the burgeoning digital paper space. AI innovation has been a particular focus for Goodnotes following the 2023 launch of Goodnotes 6, which included the world’s first generative AI for handwritten text and thereby transformed Goodnotes into the world’s first AI-powered digital paper company.

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“Like many M&As, the meeting of Goodnotes and Traw was like fitting together forgotten puzzle pieces,” said Kyumin Sim, former Traw co-founder and CEO and now a product lead at Goodnotes. “We’ve put a lot of thought into what digital note-taking should look like, so it’s especially an honor to collaborate with Goodnotes, the world’s most popular note-taking app. I’m excited about the new features this will inspire and the value we’ll bring to many people.”

In addition to leveraging the skilled Traw team to create new ways to enhance AI note-taking features, Goodnotes plans to explore extending its offerings beyond “pen and paper” note-taking, incorporating modalities beyond the stylus, and eyeing new mediums to integrate into the platform.

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“When I met the Traw team for the first time in Seoul, I knew right away that the AI tools they’ve built for audio and video recordings are a natural fit for Goodnotes,” said Steven, CEO at Goodnotes. “I was really impressed by not only their innovative ideas, but also their passion and drive. We feel very fortunate to be in a position to acquire small, capable teams like Traw to accelerate our roadmap.”

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