Evernote Acquires Penultimate After Raising $70M at $1B Valuation

Penultimate, the handwritten note-taking app for the iPad, has just been aquired by Evernote. (Photo: Cocoa Box Design)

Penultimate -- which allows iPad users to take handwritten notes, sketches and perform other notebook-like services -- supported Evernote integration prior to its acquisition. The aquisition will undoubtedly give the popular iPad software better cloud-storage capabilities. At the moment, pages that users create in Penultimate can be exported to Evernote and cloud-storage locker Dropbox.

Realizing that Evernote and Penultimate have such obviously complementary technologies, we're teaming up, said Penultimate creator Ben Zotto in a blog post this morning. Evernote has acquired Penultimate, and I'll be joining Evernote to help bring their significant resources to bear on making Penultimate better, faster. You'll also start seeing Penultimate (finally!) on other devices, and we'll be bringing great handwriting into other parts of Evernote.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin was quick to note that Penultimate will remain on course . Penultimate will stay a separate, elegant application and will get many much-requested Evernote-y improvements including full search and synchronization, said Libin on the Evernote blog. Ben will also lead the effort to put handwriting and digital ink functionality into other Evernote products and platforms, so you'll see handwriting cross-pollination popping up everywhere.

In a Cnet report, Libin said that handwritten notes were at the heart of Evernote since the beginning, but over time, the company shifted its focus to text-based note-taking. He also said that Evernote's character recognition technology will make Penultimate notes searchable and will leverage the features in Penultimate.

Terms of the sale have not been disclosed. Cnet reports that Zotto is already working out of the Evernote office in Mountain View, Calif. Zotto and Libin made the announcement in a short video posted on the Evernote blog.