Granola

Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson founded Granola in London in 2023 after meeting through a community that compared notes on work tools. Pedregal had already been through the full startup loop — he had built Socratic, an education app that Google later acquired. Together, they identified that note-taking during meetings wasn't the real problem: what comes after meetings was. People left calls with decisions half-captured, action items scattered, and context trapped in memory. Existing AI notetakers sent a visible bot into your meeting, which participants found invasive and which many organisations banned.

Granola's core insight was architectural: run the transcription on the user's computer rather than sending a bot into the meeting. The app transcribes audio in the background while the user takes notes normally. When the meeting ends, Granola uses AI to enhance and flesh out those notes into a shareable, searchable record. No bot joins the call. No participant is aware of it. The product launched publicly in May 2024 and spread virally through Silicon Valley's founder and investor community — partners at Benchmark, Sequoia, Accel, and Union Square Ventures adopted it, as did founders at Vercel, Ramp, and Roblox. Users grew 10% every week after launch.

Granola raised $20 million in a Series A led by Spark Capital, then $43 million in a Series B led by NFDG (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's fund) at a $250 million valuation in May 2025. The funding came alongside the launch of collaborative features — shared team workspaces where multiple users could contribute to the same meeting notes and query across them. Enterprise customers including Vanta, Gusto, Asana, and Mistral AI adopted the platform. Total funding reached $192 million across four rounds.

In March 2026, Granola raised $125 million in a Series C led by Index Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation — up from $250 million less than a year earlier. Alongside the funding, the company launched Spaces (team workspaces with granular access controls), a personal API and enterprise API enabling AI tools to query meeting notes directly, and an MCP server connecting Granola to Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, v0, and Bolt.new. The company's ambition had expanded from note-taking to something more significant: positioning meeting transcripts as the richest source of organisational context for enterprise AI — the conversational memory that documents and wikis could never capture.