Users may not favor bots in meetings visibly taking notes, but many are fine with an app on a computer doing the transcription. This is the primary reason for Granola’s popularity, leading to $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This increased the company’s valuation to $1.5 billion, up from $250 million in the previous round.
The company stated that existing investors like Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG also participated in the round. With this round, following less than a year after its $43 million round, the startup has raised $192 million.
Granola, transitioning from a prosumer app that transcribes meetings, generates notes, and sits on your computer, has been developing enterprise stack features. For example, it started allowing shared notes among teammates last year. Now it has made inroads into enterprises like Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI.
With the fundraising announcement, Granola is introducing a feature called Spaces, which function as team workspaces. Folders can be created within these workspaces, offering granular access controls. Users can search notes from Spaces and Folders separately.
The company recognizes that AI meeting notes are becoming widespread, with many competitors offering this feature. Thus, after launching a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, it is now releasing two new APIs for integrating note context into AI workflows.
Granola now offers a personal API for accessing personal and shared notes and an enterprise API for admins to manage team context. The personal API is available for business and enterprise plan users, while the enterprise API is exclusive to enterprise customers.
The API release follows criticisms from users, including an a16z partner, who were upset with Granola for restricting its local database, disrupting on-device AI agent workflows. Co-founder Chris Pedregal clarified that the local cache was not designed for AI workflows, prompting changes in data storage that affected the workflows. He assured users that Granola would offer APIs for bulk data access and promised to work with local AI agents.
The company is updating its MCP server to show notes in folders and shared notes. Its app already integrates with tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, with plans to add more partners.
As meeting note-taking becomes standard, startups in this sector aim to enable users and companies to act on notes and transcripts. This includes drafting follow-up emails, scheduling meetings, or leveraging company databases and CRMs for lead finalization. Companies like Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill have already embarked on this path.