Designing tomorrow’s digital mind

tl;dr: I’m joining Delphi to build something new. Supernotes continues to be independent & timeless.

Back in 2018, while studying engineering in London my co-founder Connor and I dreamt of building a better way for students to take notes and learn together. Solving our shared problem of getting lost in long-form documents, uninspiring interfaces, struggling to collaborate together.

Over seven years, we built Supernotes – a fast, robust, and timeless notes app designed with the future in mind. Instead of long documents, we pioneered a short-form notecard format, perfect for reading, spaced repetition, and sharing ideas. We pushed the boundaries of what defines a notes app – we became the first to support mainstream VR and the first to automatically assign and pin locations to notes on a map.

The question that we’ve been trying to answer this year is what’s next for us?

Do we go further – build an “everything app” and risk diluting the quality that Supernotes has. Or do we keep Supernotes sharp, and take what we’ve learned to create something new with AI?

I’m excited to announce we are indeed building something new, but this time we’re not building alone. Connor and I are joining Delphi, to help shape the AI digital mind of tomorrow. While, keeping Supernotes entirely independent and under our ownership, in line with our commitment to establishing an everlasting, sustainable product. Here’s the full story…

We all want something different today

Somewhere along the way, expectations and needs changed. Our world shifted from “give me a great tool for taking notes” to “give me an everything-app that reads my mind, answers my questions, and manages my life.” We felt that pressure up close. Should Supernotes handle files? Calendars? Tasks? Email? The gravitational pull toward “everything” is strong, and this pull has been infinitely compounded by the onset of LLMs and Generative AI.

We’ve debated taking those paths many times, because we know that every time we bolt on another feature, the tool risks losing its sharpness. Chasing the everything app dilutes the exact quality that makes Supernotes feel great: intentionality. That’s why, over and over again, we’ve chosen to innovate within notes rather than stapling on another generic module. Features like our newly released Map Layout, which reimagines how you relate notes to locations, allow us to improve the core experience without turning Supernotes into a kitchen sink.

Could we raise VC investment to compete with giants that roll multiple products into one? Perhaps. But scaling a feature checklist isn’t the same as building a great tool.

We’ve watched all-in-one suites and AI writing assistants hoover up adjacent features and make acquisitions to expand their footprint. With Notion valued at over $10 billion. And Grammarly joining the race to build the best everything app with it’s recent acquisitions of Coda and Superhuman. Competing head-to-head in that game as a small, sustainable team would mean raising money and committing to a growth story we don’t believe in. That’s not why we started Supernotes, and it’s not what our users trust us for.

AI in existing interfaces

Since the release of GPT-3 our Community has been asking for more AI in Supernotes. GenAI is incredibly exciting and one of the biggest paradigm shifts in software for a generation. So like everyone else, we experimented. We built many AI prototypes, we tried a wave of AI-enhanced notetakers, and we kept bumping into the same feeling – these tools automate existing habits rather than help you build better ones. They make you passive. They skip the part where thinking happens.

If we retrofitted Supernotes to follow that trend, we’d risk flattening the deliberate experience that the members of our diverse community have come to love. The end result was excitement about AI combined with a reluctance to add too much of it to Supernotes. We traded notes with other teams wrestling with the same trade-offs – from chats on our doorstep with Granola & startups in London to coffees with Notion & VCs in San Francisco. Those conversations sharpened a conviction we now hold firmly: an AI-first tool deserves a blank sheet of paper and a daring new interface, not a patch stitched onto a much-loved notes app.

What’s Delphi?

While we were exploring our thoughts on AI, by coincidence a company doing exactly that reached out. An email from Dara, CEO at Delphi, landed in our inbox. Delphi is innovating thoughtful ai-powered presences for real people, with early adopters ranging from Tiago Forte to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their team has been following our work for a while, and asked us a simple question.

“Would you like to join us?”

We were intrigued, so in July we flew out to spend time at their office in San Francisco, and something clicked. Their vision, “build your digital mind,” aligned up with our own curiosity about how people can interact with knowledge, reflect, and learn. But unlike Supernotes’ manual ethos, Delphi is AI-first by design. It isn’t just another chat box; their prototypes ask questions, nudge deeper understanding, and push beyond the limits of today’s GPT-shaped interfaces. Helping you save the most precious resource you have – your time.

As anyone reading this probably understands, we care deeply about user trust. And we think Delphi’s approach is best-in-class in this regard: you can only make a Delphi of yourself (no characters, no adult themes), and the team’s ethics and guardrails have taken a concept that could be dystopian but have instead made it feel human, not hollow. Backed by top investors and advisors, they have the resources and ambition to pursue a true blue-sky interface for thinking. We were excited at the chance to help responsibly shape that future.

So this month Connor and I are joining Delphi to help build your digital mind of tomorrow – bringing Supernotes’ hard-won lessons about structure, speed, and intentionality into an AI-first canvas. With Delphi we can explore use-cases that stretch far beyond note-taking. It’s work that deserves commitment.

What’s next for Supernotes?

Our promise is that Supernotes will be around for many years to come, still our much-loved daily driver for drafting, jotting, mapping, and learning. And be what’s it’s also been – a fantastic, reliable notes app. A timeless one.

Like Things 3 or iA Writer, our ambition has always been to stay sharp, and focused. We already have an rich feature list with realtime sync, proper offline mode, an open API; and apps for Mac, Windows, Linux iOS, Android, Web and VR. Supernotes as a business is sustainable – there’s no fundraising treadmill that pushes us toward an exit, it will continue receiving updates and be proudly independent, based in the UK.

A bright future

Think of it this way: if the knowledge-tool landscape were a garage, Supernotes is a precision-tuned sports car – responsive and rewarding once you learn the clutch. It’s not for hauling everything you own; it’s for driving well. We won’t bolt a chatbot onto the hood just because it’s fashionable. It’s manual, intentional and lightning fast.

And Delphi is where we’re helping build the next rocket ship, a bigger team with more resources – innovating and designing an AI-first medium that actually helps people think better. Same mission we started with: “knowledge shared is knowledge gained”, now expressed through two tools that each do one thing exceptionally well.

Here’s to a future where software doesn’t just save us time, but helps us think more clearly, learn more deeply, and connect more meaningfully. We’re just getting started at Delphi – if you’d like to help us shape this future, we’re hiring. And if you’re curious, chat with my Delphi right now.

~ Tobias