Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a $20M Series A led by Spark Capital, with participation from investors AI Grant, Lightspeed, Betaworks, Firstminute Capital, and others.

While today’s LLMs have been trained on a massive amount of the web, they are missing one of the most useful sources of data: our conversations. Making the information in our conversations accessible and useful is so valuable, it’s unsurprising that so many tech players are chasing this prize. However, in a sea of AI notetakers, Granola is the only one putting the human first.

What's Granola?

Granola is an AI-powered notepad for meetings. You jot the things that matter to you (like a regular notepad); Granola transcribes in the background. When the meeting ends, Granola uses AI to flesh out your notes and make them great. Use Granola for all your meetings and it becomes a living archive of your conversations. Easily searchable, queryable, and shareable.

Some key features:

• No bots: Runs on your computer, no meeting bots join your call
• Smart templates: Create and customize templates for your most common meetings (sales calls, pitches, 1 on 1s, etc)
• Ultra shareable notes: Share text or a link with a single click or send them directly to Slack.
• AI chat with every note to dig deeper into the details or generate a follow up email

The problem with AI note-takers

Let’s face it: most AI note-taking tools miss the mark. They're building for a world where the human is removed from the picture and replaced by an AI bot.

We think humans deserve more credit. Writing is thinking, and your tools should support your thinking, not replace it.

Granola’s secret? It augments you, rather than replaces you. You remain in control, writing what matters during the meeting, while AI assists afterwards to enhance your notes. The result? Notes that truly reflect your priorities and thoughts.

How we got here

In early 2023, Chris and Sam began assembling a small team of designers and engineers who obsess over making useful tools to make our work lives better.

We refined Granola with a closed group of beta testers, before launching in May 2024 with a message: if you think your judgment is valuable, you should not outsource that judgment to AI. AI should help you think better. It should not be thinking for you. The message resonated. Influential figures in Silicon Valley connected with it, and discussions sparked in the ecosystem both online and offline.

Granola quickly gained traction among leaders in tech

• Over half of Granola users are in leadership roles. Founders and leaders at unicorn companies like Vercel, Ramp, and Roblox now use Granola many times a week. Partners at top VC firms like Benchmark, Sequoia, Accel, and Union Square Ventures use it to take pitches.
• In companies where Granola lands, it spreads like wildfire—starting with a senior leader and quickly becoming a team staple. Since launch, the number of weekly users has grown 6x and is continuing to rise.
• The app has an incredibly high retention. Half of the people who try Granola still use it 10 weeks later, doing an average of 6 meetings a week.
• This early growth and traction among such senior people opened the door to the opportunistic round we’re announcing today, which will give us the firepower to make Granola better, faster.

Where we’re going

Looking ahead, we're expanding Granola beyond note-taking to uncover team-wide conversation insights, and automate post-meeting workflows. This has been a dream of forward-thinking organizations for years now, but it's finally becoming possible.

We're excited to be partnering with Nabeel at Spark Capital, whose product insight and experience with successful startups like Descript make him an ideal fit for our journey ahead.

Download Granola for Mac now, and if the mission above sounds exhilarating, we’re hiring ambitious people to join us.