AFFiNE

About AFFiNE

AFFiNE, operating under its legal entity Toeverything Pte. Ltd., is a Singapore-based company founded in 2020 by Jiachen He (CEO), Yifeng Wang, Yinan Long, and Chi Zhang. The company is developing an all-in-one workspace designed to serve as a next-generation knowledge base, positioning itself as an open-source alternative to established platforms like Notion and Miro. The platform's development was driven by the vision of its founder, Jiachen He, to merge the flexibility of a visual whiteboard with the structured nature of a document editor.

The company has achieved significant traction within the open-source community. It debuted on GitHub in August 2022 and quickly gained attention, accumulating 10,000 GitHub stars within 43 days of its launch. This momentum has been supported by substantial financial backing, with the company raising a total of $18 million in funding over two seed rounds. Its latest seed round in October 2023 brought in $8 million, led by investors such as Redpoint Ventures and Sinovation Ventures.

AFFiNE's core product is a workspace platform that integrates documents, whiteboards, and databases into a single, unified environment. A key feature is the ability to instantly switch between a structured document view and a freeform canvas or whiteboard view. This allows users to organize information using traditional text and lists or to brainstorm visually with mind maps, sticky notes, and embedded web pages. The platform is built with a local-first and privacy-focused approach, giving users more control over their data with options for self-hosting. While the community edition is free and open-source under the MIT license, there are indications of a proprietary license for the server code, suggesting a hybrid business model. Revenue is generated through a subscription-based pricing model, with a Pro plan and an Enterprise plan available for teams requiring more advanced features and cloud storage.