Dynalist Inc.
Headquarters
Toronto, CanadaFounded
2016CEO / Founder
Steph AngoEmployees
1-10Funding
BootstrappedProducts
0 products listedWebsite
obsidian.md
Profile updated
About Dynalist Inc.
Dynalist Inc., which operates under the Obsidian brand, is a Canadian software company headquartered in Toronto. It was founded by Shida Li and Erica Xu, who met while studying at the University of Waterloo and incorporated the company in 2016 to develop the outliner application Dynalist. In March 2020 the pair released Obsidian, a Markdown-based note-taking and knowledge management application that has since become the company's flagship product.
Obsidian stores notes as plain-text Markdown files on the user's own device and is extensible through thousands of community plugins and themes. The core application is free for personal and commercial use; the company earns revenue from optional paid services, including Obsidian Sync (end-to-end encrypted synchronization) and Obsidian Publish (website publishing), along with Catalyst early-access licenses. Obsidian reached version 1.0 in October 2022, and on February 6, 2023 longtime community contributor Steph Ango became CEO, with co-founders Shida Li and Erica Xu serving as CTO and COO respectively.
The company is fully bootstrapped and states it is 100% supported by its users rather than investors, having taken no venture funding. It operates with a small team of roughly eight to nine employees and continues to maintain both Obsidian and Dynalist.
Specialties
No products listed yet for this company.
Competitive Landscape
Who Dynalist Inc. competes with, and how they differ.
Cloud-hosted all-in-one workspace with a freemium, team-collaboration-first SaaS model, contrasting with Obsidian's local-first plain-Markdown vault built for individual knowledge management and requiring no account.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCloud-hosted, subscription-only networked note-taking tool (from ~$15/month) that pioneered the bidirectional-linking "second brain" niche Obsidian also serves, with no local-file or free desktop-first option.
Free, open-source, local-first outliner storing notes as Markdown/Org-mode files — the closest philosophical match to Obsidian on data ownership and offline use, but built around a daily-journal/outline structure with a smaller plugin ecosystem.
Cloud-hosted, AI-native networked-notes tool organized around structured "supertags" on a subscription model, versus Obsidian's unstructured local Markdown vault and optional one-time/subscription add-ons (Sync, Publish).
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedFreemium, cloud-based note-taking tool built around spaced-repetition flashcards for students, competing for the same PKM audience with a narrower academic-study focus than Obsidian's general-purpose vault.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Dynalist Inc.'s history, with sources.
- Milestone
Commercial license made optional ("free for work")
Obsidian eliminated its mandatory per-seat commercial license for organizations, making the app free for personal, commercial and non-profit use; the company had never been able to enforce the prior requirement because Obsidian requires no account or sign-up.
obsidian.md - Milestone
Fast Company profiles Obsidian's "cult" following at ~1M users
Fast Company (Jared Newman) reported Obsidian had grown to an estimated one million users and a Discord community of more than 110,000 members, built entirely without venture funding or paid marketing.
fastcompany.com - Milestone
Steph Ango (kepano) joins as CEO
Longtime community plugin and theme author Steph Ango ("kepano") joined Obsidian full-time as CEO; co-founders Erica Xu and Shida Li ("Silver" and "Licat") remained as COO and CTO focused on product.
obsidian.md - Launch
Obsidian 1.0.0 launched after ~2.5 years of public beta
Obsidian shipped version 1.0.0, adding tabs and tab stacks throughout the UI, a redesigned appearance/theme system, and PDF export, closing out the beta period that began in March 2020.
obsidian.md - Launch
Obsidian public beta v0.0.1 released
Erica Xu and Shida Li released the first public beta of Obsidian, a local-first, Markdown-file note-taking app, developed as a side project alongside their existing outliner company Dynalist Inc.
obsidian.md
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