companies

Readwise Inc.

Reading and highlight tool that resurfaces what you've read and now runs an AI read-later app called Reader.

Readwise was founded in 2017 by Daniel Doyon and Tristan Homsi and is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company deliberately chose to bootstrap rather than raise venture funding, arguing publicly in a widely shared 2018 blog post that the market for a reading-retention tool was better suited to a profitable, founder-owned business than a venture-scale one. It has stayed self-funded and profitable since. The original Readwise product syncs highlights from Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper, and dozens of other sources into one searchable archive, then resurfaces old highlights on a spaced-repetition schedule so they aren't forgotten the moment you close a book. In 2021 the company launched Readwise Reader, a full read-it-later app for articles, PDFs, EPUBs, newsletters, YouTube transcripts, and podcasts, later adding an AI assistant called Ghostreader that can summarize, answer questions about, and auto-tag anything you save. Readwise is aimed squarely at people who already highlight heavily — writers, researchers, and serious nonfiction readers — rather than a general note-taking audience, and its small team size relative to its user base reflects the deliberately narrow, profitable-first strategy the founders chose from day one.

Founded

2017

Headquarters

Raleigh, United States

Sector

applications