Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation, expanding from AI notetaker to enterprise AI platform

Granola raises $125M, hits $1.5B valuation as it expands from meeting notetaker to enterprise AI app | TechCrunch

Users might not like bots in meetings visibly taking notes, but a lot of them don't mind if an app on someone's computer is doing the transcription. That's the core reason behind Granola's popularity, which helped it secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This has tipped the company's valuation to $1.5 billion, it said, up from $250 million as of the last round. The company said that existing investors like Lightspeed, Spark and NFDG participated in the round as well. With this round, which comes less than a year after its $43 million round, the startup has raised $192 million. From being a prosumer app that sits on your computer, transcribes meetings, and generates notes, Granola has been building features to suit an enterprise stack. For instance, last year, it started allowing teammates to collaborate on notes. It's now made inroads into enterprises such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, it says. With the fundraising announcement, Granola is also adding a feature called Spaces, which are essentially workspaces for a team. You can also create Folders within this workspace. Spaces have granular controls around who can access what part. Users can query notes from Spaces and folders separately. The company understands that AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity at this point, with many players offering this feature. That is why, after introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is introducing two new APIs for integrating the context of notes into AI workflows. Granola now has a personal API that lets people access their notes and notes shared with them, and an enterprise API to let admins work with team context. Personal API is available to users on business and enterprise plans and the enterprise API is available only to enterprise users. The API launch comes after a bunch of users, including an a16z partner, were mad at Granola for locking down its local database and breaking on-device AI agent workflows they had set up. Granola co-founder, Chris Pedregal, clarified that the company didn't want to lock down data, but its local cache was not designed to handle AI workflows, and the startup decided to change how it stored the data. That move broke the agent workflows. Pedregal promised at that time that Granola would launch APIs for users to access data in bulk. He also said that the company will figure out a way to work with local AI agents. The company said that it is also updating its MCP server to let users see notes in folders and notes shared with them. It noted that its app already connects with tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, and the startup is working on bringing more partners on board. As meeting note-taking becomes a commonplace feature, the value for startups in this category is to enable users and companies to take actions based on the notes and transcripts. This could range from drafting follow-up emails, or finding time for the next set of meetings, or drawing knowledge from the company database and CRMs to get closer to finalizing a lead. Some companies, such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill, have already started working in this direction.

AI Notetaker Granola Hits $1.5 Billion Value in $125 Million Funding

Granola plans to introduce agentic AI features to allow users to perform tasks using the information they've gathered in the startup's note files, with CEO Chris Pedregal expecting the integrations within the next year. Granola Inc., a startup whose artificial intelligence software has been gaining traction as a notetaking tool among Silicon Valley workers, is raising $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures. Index partner Danny Rimer will join Granola's board as an observer. Kleiner Perkins is also participating in the funding round, alongside existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital. Granola's product transcribes conversations and uses AI to turn rough-draft meeting notes into complete summaries. Chief Executive Officer Chris Pedregal said that many of its corporate customers, which include companies like Cursor and Gusto, have adopted the technology after individual employees started using it. Something similar happened at Index, Rimer said: Multiple people at the firm were using the technology by the time he considered investing. As of mid-March, Granola's revenue had grown by 2 1/2 times since the beginning of the year, Pedregal said, declining to disclose specific revenue figures. Alongside the funding, the startup is launching new features for its app, including integrations with AI coding tools like Anthropic PBC's Claude Code, as well as team workspaces where employees can pool their notes. Granola's next act, Pedregal said, will be to introduce agentic AI features to allow users to perform tasks using the information they've gathered in the startup's note files. While the CEO declined to share specifics about the plans, he said he expects the integrations within the next year. The company's agentic AI ambitions were "paramount" in Index's decision to invest in Granola, Rimer said. Founded in 2023, five years after Pedregal sold his last AI startup to Google, Granola now has about 55 employees. "It's obvious our team is too small for what we want to achieve," Pedregal said. But he said the startup is being careful about how quickly it hires, since it's not clear yet how AI will change workforce needs in the long run. Some industry watchers believe that AI note-taking, already a competitive space, is on its way to becoming a commodity. Pedregal doesn't disagree. It's part of why he envisions much more for Granola's future. "I never would've entered this space if what I wanted to do was just to generate meeting notes. It was a commoditized, oversaturated space before we started Granola, let alone now," he said. "We're just at the beginning of how we're going to collaborate with AI to do work."

Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation to turn meetings into enterprise AI context | TNW

Granola, the London-based AI meeting app that records conversations without dropping a bot into the call, has raised $125 million in a Series C round led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. The round values the company at $1.5 billion, a sixfold increase from its $250 million valuation less than a year ago, and brings total funding to $192 million. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and NFDG, the venture firm run by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, also participated. Rimer will join Granola's board as an observer. The valuation leap is striking even by the standards of the current AI funding boom. In May 2025, Granola raised a $43 million Series B from NFDG at a $250 million valuation. Before that, it closed a $20 million Series A in October 2024 with just 5,000 weekly users, and a $4.25 million seed round from Lightspeed and betaworks in May 2023. The trajectory from seed to unicorn in under three years is unusually fast, though not without precedent in this market cycle. The product's appeal is deceptively simple. Granola sits on a user's computer and records meeting audio locally rather than sending a visible bot into the call. It transcribes the conversation, generates structured notes, and makes those notes searchable across an organisation. The approach matters because many professionals, particularly in sales, legal, and executive functions, find meeting bots intrusive. Granola's pitch is that it captures the same information without the social awkwardness. The company, founded in 2023 by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson, has since expanded well beyond note-taking. Granola Chat lets users query their conversation history using Claude, GPT, or Gemini. Spaces allow teams to organise, share, and search contextual notes across meetings and channels. And earlier this year, the company launched a Model Context Protocol server and two new APIs, one personal and one enterprise-grade, that let users and administrators integrate meeting context into external AI workflows. That last feature is the one Pedregal is betting the company's future on. AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity, with Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Read AI, and Quill all offering variants of the same transcription-plus-summary formula. Granola's argument is that the real value is not in the notes themselves but in making the knowledge locked inside conversations accessible to other systems. If an AI agent can pull context from every meeting a team has ever had, the reasoning goes, it can make better decisions about what to do next. The funding is explicitly earmarked for enterprise expansion. Granola counts Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI among its customers, a mix that spans compliance, fintech, home services, project management, developer tools, and AI itself. The enterprise API includes SSO, SCIM, and consent-based data management, the table-stakes infrastructure that large organisations require before adopting any tool that records employee conversations. The competitive landscape is crowded and moving quickly. Fireflies.ai has built a user base of more than 16 million and reached a $1 billion valuation. Otter.ai has been in the market since 2016 and holds significant brand recognition. Glean and Mem.ai are approaching the same problem from the enterprise knowledge management side. And the incumbents, Notion, Microsoft, and Google, are all building AI meeting features into their existing productivity suites. Granola's advantage, if it holds, is that it arrived early to the intersection of meeting intelligence and agentic AI. The MCP server, the APIs, and the LLM integrations position it as a context layer rather than a standalone app, something other AI tools can query rather than compete with. Whether that positioning survives contact with Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini at enterprise scale is the central question the next two years will answer. A $1.5 billion valuation for a company that was worth $250 million ten months ago invites scrutiny. Granola has not disclosed revenue figures, user counts, or retention metrics publicly. The AI meeting assistant market is projected to grow from roughly $3.5 billion in 2025 to more than $34 billion by 2035, according to Market Research Future, which gives the category room to support multiple large companies. But the gap between market potential and demonstrated revenue remains wide across the sector. What Granola does have is product-market fit in a specific niche: professionals who want AI-powered meeting intelligence without the friction of a visible bot. That niche has proved large enough to attract Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, two firms that do not typically chase early-stage hype. Whether it proves large enough to justify a $1.5 billion price tag will depend on how quickly the enterprise product converts pilots into contracts, and how defensible the context-layer strategy turns out to be against competitors with far larger distribution networks.

Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation for its AI note-taking app - SiliconANGLE

Granola Inc., the startup behind a popular note-taking app of the same name, has raised $125 million in funding to expand its workforce and feature set. Index Ventures led the Series C investment. It was joined by Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Spark and NFDG. Bloomberg reported that the investment follows a quarter in which Granola's revenue grew by 250%. Granola's namesake note-taking app is available on Windows and iOS. It uses artificial intelligence to transcribe business discussions and generate meeting notes. Furthermore, it can enhance manually written meeting notes by polishing the text or adding in details the user missed. For example, Granola could round out a summary of a sales conversion by adding in more detailed information about the prospect's requirements. Workers can use a chat interface to search through meeting notes. A developer, for example, could request a list of the feature suggestions that were floating during a technical discussion. Frequently repeating requests can be turned into prompt templates called Recipes. Users can launch Recipes with a shortcut, which removes the need to manually type them on every ocassion. Granola's chat interface doubles as a content creation tool. Users can ask it to turn information from meeting notes into assets such as presentations and product specifications.. Granola is available in a free tier and two paid versions. The $14 per month Business plan offers access to more advanced AI models and integrations with several popular cloud services. The top-end Enterprise subscription, which is priced at $35 per month, adds an expanded set of cybersecurity controls and priority customer support. Granola announced its funding round today in conjunction with the introduction of several new features. The first addition, Team Spaces, enables workers to share meeting notes with one another via shared folders. Salespeople, for example, can compare notes from customer presentations to identify ways of honing their pitch. Granola is making it easier to share notes with not only other users but also third-party services. As part of today's update, the company is rolling out two application programming interfaces that enable workers to sync data stored in its platform to external applications. A designer could send a note that contains website layout ideas to Cursor and have the programming tool automatically generate prototypes. The third major addition to Granola is a new observability dashboard for administrators. A company's information technology team can use it to track the number of employees who use the note-taking app, the amount of data they generate and other metrics.

AI notetaker Granola hits $1.5 billion value in $125 million funding

Granola, an AI notetaking startup, is raising $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures, with support from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital. Alongside the funding, the startup is launching new features for its app, including integrations with AI coding tools like Anthropic PBC's Claude Code, as well as team workspaces where employees can pool their notes. Granola, a startup whose artificial intelligence software has been gaining traction as a notetaking tool among Silicon Valley workers, is raising $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures. Index partner Danny Rimer will join Granola's board as an observer. Kleiner Perkins is also participating in the funding round, alongside existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital. Granola's product transcribes conversations and uses AI to turn rough-draft meeting notes into complete summaries. Chief Executive Officer Chris Pedregal said that many of its corporate customers, which include companies like Cursor and Gusto, have adopted the technology after individual employees started using it. Something similar happened at Index, Rimer said: Multiple people at the firm were using the technology by the time he considered investing. As of mid-March, Granola's revenue had grown by 2 1/2 times since the beginning of the year, Pedregal said, declining to disclose specific revenue figures. Alongside the funding, the startup is launching new features for its app, including integrations with AI coding tools like Anthropic PBC's Claude Code, as well as team workspaces where employees can pool their notes. Granola's next act, Pedregal said, will be to introduce agentic AI features to allow users to perform tasks using the information they've gathered in the startup's note files. While the CEO declined to share specifics about the plans, he said he expects the integrations within the next year. The company's agentic AI ambitions were "paramount" in Index's decision to invest in Granola, Rimer said. Founded in 2023, five years after Pedregal sold his last AI startup to Google, Granola now has about 55 employees. "It's obvious our team is too small for what we want to achieve," Pedregal said. But he said the startup is being careful about how quickly it hires, since it's not clear yet how AI will change workforce needs in the long run. Some industry watchers believe that AI note-taking, already a competitive space, is on its way to becoming a commodity. Pedregal doesn't disagree. It's part of why he envisions much more for Granola's future. "I never would've entered this space if what I wanted to do was just to generate meeting notes. It was a commoditised, oversaturated space before we started Granola, let alone now," he said. "We're just at the beginning of how we're going to collaborate with AI to do work."