You already write by hand because it makes you think. The problem was never the writing. It's that nothing ever came back out. gemnotes reads the ink you've already put on the page and turns years of notebooks into something you can search, ask and structure.
$470 early · no card required · the software runs today
● people have reserved · the early $470 price is open until we decide to build
You know you wrote it down. A number, a name, the one good line. It's in one of the notebooks, somewhere, about three months ago. You flip for two minutes, give up, and reconstruct it from memory, badly.
reMarkable, Boox and Supernote have spent a decade competing on how writing feels: lower latency, grippier surfaces, better nibs. That half is close to finished, and they did a good job of it.
Almost nobody is working on what happens after you write.
“None of them offer cross-notebook full-text search. None produce searchable PDFs. None export Markdown. All three companion apps offer: nothing. No REST API. No outbound webhooks.”Independent 2026 teardown of the three major e-ink note platformsRead why this exists →
Software that is deliberately not tied to any manufacturer, runs its AI locally, and understands diagrams as well as sentences. The tablet is a door, not the product.
Every hardware company builds its own closed stack, because neutrality would be suicide for them. It's the one thing we can build that they structurally cannot copy.
Not “encrypted in transit”, not “we don't look”. The vision model and the index run on your own computer, so there is nothing to leak.
Because we keep the raw strokes, including the order you drew them in, gemnotes can tell a box from an arrow from a label. Everyone else flattens the page to a PNG first.
The tablet reads your handwriting where the pen already is, and hands over ink and text together. The desktop is where the archive lives: search, commitments, deadlines, review, export — all of it on your machine, none of it uploaded.
Open the cover and you're already on a page. No home screen, no grid of apps. Five tools that you swipe in from the left edge and that vanish when you let go.
There's a search box on the device too, and it takes handwriting, not a virtual keyboard. Typing on e-ink is the thing that killed Light Phone II.
See the notebook UI →
A timeline with no folders, threads it groups by itself, scrawled mind maps rebuilt into something exportable, an ask box that answers in your own words, and a local MCP server so your AI can read the archive.
Every single thing it produces points back at the strokes you actually drew.
See the desktop app →
Under 5 mm. 330-360 g. A 23 g battery-free stylus with a zirconia nib that never wears out. No frontlight, no speaker, no camera, no Android, no home screen, all of it removed on purpose, so the money goes into the screen and the pen.
In development · reservations open · no card required
“The code exists” is not the same as “it works”, and a website is the easiest place in the world to blur the two. So there's a page that doesn't.
Native capture at 5 ms ink latency on reference e-ink hardware. Real handwriting recognised at 87.5% of words exactly right. Cross-notebook search that lands on the exact strokes. A working MCP server.
The stroke classifier, box vs arrow vs circle vs text, is the next engineering task, and the first attempt scored zero. The screens exist; the rebuild does not.
The industrial design is finalised and reservations are open, but no unit has been manufactured. Every image on this site is labelled as a render.