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.