This startup bridges handwriting, voice, and AI

This article is a part of Startup Spotlight, a series that features young, up-and-coming startups.

Photo credit: Weiguang Fan

Two engineers in Singapore launched Notewise in 2023 to build a digital canvas resembling a natural whiteboard. The product quickly evolved beyond simple handwriting. AI now bridges voice, images, and text to help users process scattered thoughts.

😟 Problem

Data capture is easy, but making sense of scattered information remains a universal bottleneck. Students and professionals juggle handwritten notes on tablets, lecture recordings on phones, and scattered PDFs. Notes often become static storage requiring manual sorting.

💡 Solution

The startup brings all data capture methods into one centralized space. Users input information naturally before the multimodal AI processes the data. 

The platform provides several core capabilities to organize these inputs, including: 

• Audio transcription and handwriting recognition
• Document understanding and summarization
• Auto-generated quizzes and study materials
• Cross-referencing across all captured notes

Image credit: Notewise

📊 Market size

Productivity tools like Notion and Canva have reached 100 million and 260 million monthly users, respectively.

At roughly US$5 to US$10 per month, 1 million paying users would generate US$60 million to US$120 million in annual recurring revenue. Five million paying users would represent US$300 million to US$600 million in ARR.

🤝 Team

• Weiguang Fan. Co-founder. He is a former software engineer at Google and a computer science graduate from the National University of Singapore.
• Mingyang Sun. Co-founder. He previously worked as an engineer at Microsoft and ByteDance before helping scale the current platform.

🚀 Traction

• Surpassed 8 million global downloads with strong adoption in North America and Europe
• Nominated for Apple Design Awards in 2025 and 2026
• Named a Google Play Best of 2024 winner
• Selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator Southeast Asia AI Focus in 2026

🏆 Competition

Existing options span digital handwriting leaders like Goodnotes and AI tools like Gemini Notebook. The company differentiates itself by supporting the entire journey of a thought across any format. The platform remains mobile-first and deeply integrated with freeform handwriting.

💰 Financials

🚩 Risks