Company Overview
About Heptabase
Heptabase is a Taipei-based visual knowledge management platform that lets researchers, students, and knowledge workers organize complex information through a spatial whiteboard interface — placing notes as cards on infinite canvases, connecting related ideas visually, and enabling the kind of non-linear thinking that linear note-taking tools like Notion and Obsidian constrain. Founded in 2021 by CEO Alan Chan and backed by Y Combinator, Heptabase raised $2.2 million in funding, reached $1.2 million in revenue in 2024 with 30,000 active paid users, growing with an 8-person team.
Business Model & Competitive Advantage
Heptabase's core interface is the Whiteboard — a spatial canvas where notes (cards) can be positioned, grouped, and connected to represent the relationships between ideas. Users can also organize cards linearly in a Journal (daily notes), and view all notes in a card library with search. The visual-spatial approach is specifically designed for "sensemaking" tasks — research synthesis, paper writing, course learning, project planning — where understanding connections and structures between ideas matters as much as capturing individual facts.
Competitive Landscape 2025–2026
In 2025, Heptabase competes in the knowledge management and note-taking market with Obsidian (local-first markdown with graph view), Notion (collaborative workspace), Roam Research (bidirectional linking), Miro (whiteboard-first collaboration), and Napkin.ai (AI-powered idea visualization) for the researcher and knowledge worker segment. The "tools for thought" category has attracted significant startup and open-source activity, with many users maintaining complex note systems across multiple tools. Heptabase's differentiation is the tightly integrated whiteboard-as-primary-interface design — not just a graph view overlay on text notes, but spatial thinking as the organizing principle. The 2025 strategy focuses on growing the academic and researcher user base, deepening the AI-assisted connection and synthesis features, and expanding PDF annotation and academic reading workflow integration.
Open Positions
Reddit Discussions
Key Differentiators
Emerging Innovator
Heptabase is an emerging player bringing innovative solutions to the Infrastructure market.
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