Notion Signs Lease for Headquarters in San Francisco

Notion, a once struggling artificial intelligence startup, has rebounded in the “AI capital of the world” with a 105,000-square-foot office headquarters lease in Downtown San Francisco.

The locally based tech firm has inked a deal for the historic Monadnock Building at 685 Market Street, in the Financial District, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing an unidentified source.

Financial terms of the 10-year lease with owner Brookfield Properties, based in New York, were not disclosed. Brokers Jak Churton, Charlie Hanafin and Matt Shewey of JLL represented Brookfield in the deal. Brokers Luke Ogelsby and Sarah Kelley of CBRE represented Notion.

The 10-story building near Market and Third streets has sat mostly empty since Uber listed it for sublease in 2019. Its ground-floor storefronts are occupied by Bluestone Lane coffee shop, cocktail bars Dawn Club and the Lark, an optometrist and a pizza joint.

The Beaux Arts building, built in 1907 after the San Francisco earthquake, was last renovated in 2016. Notion will take five floors through 2034, and has options to expand within the building, the source told the Chronicle.

The company will now exit 65,000 square feet of offices subleased in 2021 for its headquarters in the Mission District.

It was 2015 when the productivity software firm co-founded two years earlier by Ivan Zhao almost went belly up, forcing its leaders to lay off workers and leave the office in San Francisco for Japan to cut costs, according to the Chronicle.

Now Notion has bounced back, boosted by remote work and backed by a number of notable investors.

Valued at $10 billion in 2021, the company launched an artificial intelligence assistant last year and is now among a growing group of AI firms finding new offices in what Mayor London Breed dubs the “AI capital of the world.”

While a shift to remote work led by tech firms has driven the city’s office vacancy higher than 37 percent, AI firms have moved in to help fill the breach.

A year ago, ChatGPT creator OpenAI inked a deal for 486,600 square feet of offices in Mission Bay, taking up a campus once occupied by Uber. In September, it signed another 315,000-square-foot lease for the building next door, bringing its office footprint to nearly 1 million square feet.

In May, ScaleAI snagged a 180,000-square-foot office sublease from Airbnb in Showplace Square, tripling its offices in San Francisco.

In September last year, Anthropic, another AI company, leased 230,000 square feet of Slack’s former headquarters in the Transbay neighborhood. It joined Hive AI, Hayden AI and Tome AI in inking office leases last summer.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, AI companies have leased more than 1.7 million square feet of offices in the city, according to the San Francisco Standard. In the past seven years, such firms have leased a total of 4.3 million square feet of offices in an otherwise contracting market.

— Dana Bartholomew