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.
