Granola Raises $43M in Series B Funding, Launches AI-Powered Collaborative Workspace

AI note-taking app Granola raises $43M at $250M valuation, launches collaborative features | TechCrunch

AI-powered note-taking tool Granola has been on a roll. The startup's seen a steep uptick in usage since it launched a year ago, mostly thanks to word of mouth among VCs and founders, but a big driver seems to be the fact that people are using it for doing more than its core pitch -- automated note-taking for meetings. Granola's co-founder, Chris Pedragel, told TechCrunch that the company's users are increasingly using Granola for taking personal notes, which helps them make all their information, both from work and otherwise, available to the app's AI to parse and surface insights from. "[People] have Granola open all day because they have a lot of meetings, so it's like [...] where they're starting to live," he said. Pedragel said Granola's organic popularity among the tech crowd and diversifying use-cases has helped its user base grow 10% every week since its launch, though he didn't specify how many users it currently has. Off the back of that rapid growth and popularity, Granola on Wednesday said it has raised $43 million in a Series B funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's venture firm, NFDG, at a valuation of $250 million. The round also saw participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Spark, as well as angel investors including Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Replit's Amjad Masad, Shopify's Tobi Lutke, and Linear's Karri Saarinen. The round brings the company's total funding raised to $67 million. Alongside this funding, Granola is also extending its remit beyond its current single-user focus to make itself more useful for businesses: It's launching a new collaboration feature that lets users share transcripts and notes with teammates, and enable the app's AI take to advantage of a broader pool of notes and details to surface insights. Users in an organization can create custom folders for various collaborative use cases like sales calls, customer feedback and hiring. The app will also let users share meeting notes with people who don't use Granola to let them chat with its AI and ask it questions. Other meeting transcription and note-taking apps, such as Read AI, Fireflies and Otter, already offer similar shared space features. Pedregal, though, says Granola is for more than note-taking. "I think how Granola differs from other notetakers is that it is very personal and you are in control all the time. You can edit notes at any point. It is not about just capturing a meeting, but it is a space where you can work, even post meetings," he said. Earlier this month, Granola updated its app to enable users to ask the AI bot questions about all meetings it had recorded. Building on that, the company will now allow users to ask questions about specific folders as well. Granola's new collaborative focus is part of a broader trend -- many AI-powered meeting transcription and note-taking tools are expanding their focus and building integrations with other tools as they try to become a hub that stores and lets users search through knowledge from various sources. Meanwhile, productivity suites are introducing transcription tools to keep customers from having to use other apps for that purpose. For instance, Notion just yesterday launched an AI meeting note-taking tool. Lightspeed's Mike Mignano believes that Granola has an edge in this space because of its interface and user experience. "Since the start, the company has had the right mix of AI transcript and human control of taking notes. Now that they are building context across the meetings and making the notes shareable, the product has become stronger. With these features, Granola will have long-term context for users and teams, kicking off network effects for the startup," he said.

Granola Launches AI Workspace for Teams and Raises $43M Series B

Granola, the AI-powered notepad that combines your typed notes with AI transcriptions, today launches Granola 2.0. This major update transforms the company's popular AI meeting assistant into a powerful, intelligent workspace for teams. Every day, Granola transcribes and analyzes millions of minutes of conversation: collective knowledge which is now accessible and actionable across entire organizations. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250514342646/en/ "Since our launch a year ago, people have started referring to Granola as their 'second brain,'" said Christopher Pedregal, Co-Founder of Granola. "With Granola 2.0, we're bringing that power to your entire team, tapping into the most up-to-date, relevant data on what's happening in your company - the conversations your employees are having day in, day out." Granola 2.0 and all its features are rolling out today. New users can download the desktop app and create their first shared folder in under a minute. Beyond Meeting Notes: Harnessing Shared Context with AI Granola has identified that the most valuable information in companies isn't found in static documents or wikis, but in the daily conversations happening across teams. "Harnessing shared meeting context with AI will be a core tool of how effective teams work in the future," said Pedregal. "Our vision is to make Granola the place your team gets work done - a powerful, intelligent workspace sitting on top of living, up-to-date context of what's happening in your company." With the launch of 2.0, Granola is now a collaborative workspace that transforms how teams capture, share, and leverage collective knowledge: "With every call in one place, sales leaders can ask 'Why are we losing deals this quarter?,' product managers can investigate 'Which UX issues come up most often?,' and recruiters can understand 'Where do our interviews keep stalling?' - all answered instantly with source-linked citations," said Sam Stephenson, Co-Founder of Granola. What's Next The launch also coincides with the announcement that Granola has raised $43 million in Series B funding led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross from NFDG, with continued participation from existing investors Mike Mignano from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nabeel Hyatt from Spark Capital. The company has also attracted investment from an impressive roster of angel investors, including Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Amjad Masad (Replit), Tobi Lutke (Shopify), Karri Saarinen (Linear), Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Newsletter), Des Traynor (Intercom), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Zach Lloyd (Warp), Charlie Songhurst, Noah Weiss, Romain Huet, Nilan Peiris and Laura Modiano. With this funding, Granola plans to continue expanding its team in London to accelerate product development. The company is focused on making Granola a tool that not only helps teams work better but think better. About Granola Granola was founded in March 2023 by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson to change the way we work, with tools that understand us, anticipate our actions, and augment our abilities. In May 2023 they raised a $4.25M Seed round from Lightspeed Venture Partners, betaworks and FirstMinute, and raised a further $20M Series A in October 2024, led by Spark Capital, with participation from investors AI Grant, Lightspeed, Betaworks, Firstminute Capital, and others. About the Founders Chris Pedregal - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedregal/ Chris studied Computer Science at Stanford before joining Google as a Product Manager, where he worked on Gmail, Search and Maps. In 2013 he quit to launch Socratic, an AI-powered tutor for high school students, which grew organically to 10+ million MAUs and won "App of the Year" in 2017. In 2018, Socratic was acquired by Google, where it receives over four billion questions a year. Sam Stephenson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephensonsam/ Sam studied graphic design at Falmouth before spending a few years in San Francisco at a design agency and an education non-profit. Along the way, he built his own startup connecting neighborhoods to local farmers, helped build an iOS app for Swim Smooth, designed interactive ski maps for Carv and helped an array of B2B companies with design and front end development. Product Images: https://go.granola.ai/2_0-assets Company Press Assets: https://go.granola.ai/logo-assets Launch Blog: https://go.granola.ai/2_0-launch Website: https://www.granola.ai/ Twitter: https://x.com/meetgranola LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/meetgranola/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250514342646/en/

Granola Raises $43 Million for AI That Generates Searchable Meeting Transcripts | PYMNTS.com

Granola said Wednesday (May 14) that it raised $43 million in a Series B funding round and introduced the new version of its artificial intelligence notepad, Granola 2.0, which writes meeting notes and enables users to search through and chat with those transcripts. "With the new Granola, you get all the context from your team's meetings, in one place, accessible to you with AI," the company said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn. "Because the most up-to-date picture of your company isn't in any doc, wiki or spreadsheet. It's in the conversations your team is having." The company added in the post that it will use the new funding to "build the AI workspace of the future." Granola began rolling out the latest features of its AI notepad Wednesday, Granola Co-founder and CEO Chris Pedregal wrote in a Wednesday blog post. The AI notepad currently transcribes millions of minutes of meetings every day and makes its transcriptions able to be queried with AI, according to the post. The product is used by sales leaders to learn why their company is losing deals, by product managers to find which user experience (UX) issues are coming up most often, and by recruiters to diagnose any interviews that stall, per the post. "We believe that harnessing shared meeting context with AI will be a core tool of how effective teams work in the future," Pedregal said in the post. The features rolled out with Granola 2.0 include folders, shareable URLs, inline citations and jump-to-source links, support for reasoning models across providers, a browse view of public folders and auto-posting to Slack, according to the post. "All these features are our first step into making Granola the place your team gets work done," Pedregal said in the post. "A powerful, intelligent workspace sitting on top of living, up-to-date context of what's happening in your company." Nabeel Hyatt, general partner at Spark Capital, one of Granola's investors, said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn that backing Granola again in its latest round was an "easy decision." "There is just an incredible amount of customer love for this product," Hyatt said in the post. "Before Granola there were plenty of note taking products, and there will be many after. But no one takes better notes than Granola + you." The ability of AI models to process input data, spot patterns and generate relevant outputs is being leveraged to handle tasks across the business world, PYMNTS reported in October.