By XIAO Fang

Lark, a work collaboration platform under the auspices of ByteDance, is to divest the cloud-based productivity tool Mubu. The document organizer has been sold to Flomo, a note-taking app. Flomo’s founder LIU Shaonan confirmed with Jiemian News Wednesday but did not reveal the acquisition amount.

In its publicity material, Flomo describes itself as a next-generation note-taking tool, focusing on “helping you record more ideas rather than complex articles.”

ByteDance, owner of TikTok and Chinese equivalent Douyin acquired productivity tool Mubu in 2018 though the deal was not publicized at the time. Mubu is similar to Google Docs, with additional features that help with note-taking. 

That was around the time that Bytedance was preparing to launch Lark, a work collaboration app that it had been using internally.

Lark first met the light of day in 2019, when it positioned itself to directly take on the popular US productivity platform, Slack. Lark and its China version Feishu operate independently of one another and store user data separately.

When Lark was launched in 2019, the Mubu team was merged into Lark and very little has been seen or heard of Mubu until now.

Liu said Mubu will continue to operate independently after the acquisition.