Logseq raises $4.1M to Accelerate Growth of the New World Knowledge Graph

We're proud to announce our first $4.1M seed round. The financing was led by Patrick Collison, Stripe CEO, Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, Tobias Lütke, Founder of Shopify, Sriram Krishnan, GP at A16Z, along with Craft Ventures, Matrix Partners China, Day One Ventures, Charlie Cheever, Founder of Expo/Quora, and Dave Winer, the forefather of outliners, scripting, weblogs, RSS, podcasting, etc. The round also included participation from Logseq contributors and community members. The funding will be used to hire top talent and double down on product development.  

Logseq is building a new global wiki. It is an open-source, knowledge management system that stores data like your brain does; with a graph of nodes. Developers, academics, and teams of researchers rely on Logseq to capture and synthesize massive, complex data into a digestible format. Users are jumping ship from Roam, Obsidian, as well as Google Docs, Notion, etc.

The platform is a fast-growing wedge to our larger AI mission. Logseq is creating a global shared brain that stores data inter-connectedly, allowing anyone to query in natural language and receive answers that are contextually relevant.

Logseq is challenging legacy knowledge management systems that are based on skeuomorphic design (which mimics the systems used for storing physical papers, files, and folders). Why? Because humans don't think linearly in pages and folders, but rather link inter-connected concepts together non-linearly. Logseq is designed to capture this type of non-linear, thinking creating intuitive and interconnected data, and allowing users to unlock their maximum potential.

“I use Logseq every single day. It’s like uploading a part of your brain. The team and product are amazing, and remind me of the early days of human computer interaction where Kay, Engelbart, and Nelson were tracking new territory in how computers can augment human thought and ingenuity. I'm really excited about the potential."
— Nat Friedman, investor in Logseq and former CEO of GitHub

In less than a year since Logseq was founded as a company, it has a thriving developer community of hundreds of open source contributors. The user community is also growing rapidly, with thousands of daily active users in the Logseq community on Discord.

Currently, Logseq’s monthly user base is growing 20% month-over-month. These contributors are a critical component that allows the company to ship community-vetted features with exceptional speed and hundreds of community-created extensions, plugins, and contributions. Within only the last three months, Logseq has 81 community-created plugins from calendars, NLP applications, Readwise integrations, etc. Logseq has been adopted by users at Google Brain, IDEO, Facebook, Tesla, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and more.

Logseq was originally an open source passion project developed by Tienson Qin to build a more efficient tool for him to manage his productivity, as well as a program that was more intuitive for his children to learn. It was through Logseq’s open source community that Qin connected with his co-founder ZhiYuan Chen (Engineering, formerly Mogujie) and Huang Peng (Engineering, formerly Hoolay.cn), An Vu (formerly engineering at NASA/JPL) to create the company.

“Our open source community is the foundation of Logseq. It’s not only how our founding team, which is spread across the globe, first came together, but an integral part of how we will define Logseq’s roadmap as we work towards our long-term vision, building with and for the community.”
— Tienson Qin, Logseq’s co-founder and CEO

Logseq also offers unparalleled privacy by being local-first and storing information in Markdown text files on users’ local devices. Users always own their information. Because Logseq is built on top of Markdown and Org-Mode, it is also interoperable with other platforms and has integrated rendering and editing.

In the future, Logseq plans to make the app collaborative and ultimately create a World Knowledge Graph—a way to connect the individual knowledge graphs of every human and every knowledge repository in the world. For example, users will be able to connect to Stanford’s knowledge graph and stitch it to their own, without ever stepping into a classroom. The company aims to ultimately create a computer-enabled world brain.

About Logseq

The current Logseq team is comprised of Tienson Qin (CEO), Peng Huang (engineering), Gabriel Horner (engineering), Junyi Du (engineering), Lei Zhe (engineering), Shuyu Wang (engineering), Zhiyuan Chen (engineering), Jakob Tengler (design), and Ramses Oudt (community).

Logseq thrives because of its user base. Not only do dozens of coders contribute to the code base and plugins, our generous community members have helped Logseq tremendously in the past years. If you want to support Logseq financially, contribute via Open Collective. For more ways to contribute, see our contribution page.