Users might not like bots in meetings visibly taking notes, but a lot of them don’t mind if an app on someone’s computer is doing the transcription. That’s the core reason behind Granola’s popularity, which helped it secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This has tipped the company’s valuation to $1.5 billion, it said, up from $250 million as of the last round.
The company said that existing investors like Lightspeed, Spark and NFDG participated in the round as well. With this round, which comes less than a year after its $43 million round, the startup has raised $192 million.
From being a prosumer app that sits on your computer, transcribes meetings, and generates notes, Granola has been building features to suit an enterprise stack. For instance, last year, it started allowing teammates to collaborate on notes. It’s now made inroads into enterprises such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, it says.
With the fundraising announcement, Granola is also adding a feature called Spaces, which are essentially workspaces for a team. You can also create Folders within this workspace. Spaces have granular controls around who can access what part. Users can query notes from Spaces and folders separately.
The company understands that AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity at this point, with many players offering this feature. That is why, after introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is introducing two new APIs for integrating the context of notes into AI workflows.
Granola now has a personal API that lets people access their notes and notes shared with them, and an enterprise API to let admins work with team context. Personal API is available to users on business and enterprise plans and the enterprise API is available only to enterprise users.
The API launch comes after a bunch of users, including an a16z partner, were mad at Granola for locking down its local database and breaking on-device AI agent workflows they had set up. Granola co-founder, Chris Pedregal, clarified that the company didn’t want to lock down data, but its local cache was not designed to handle AI workflows, and the startup decided to change how it stored the data. That move broke the agent workflows. Pedregal promised at that time that Granola would launch APIs for users to access data in bulk. He also said that the company will figure out a way to work with local AI agents.
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The company said that it is also updating its MCP server to let users see notes in folders and notes shared with them. It noted that its app already connects with tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, and the startup is working on bringing more partners on board.
As meeting note-taking becomes a commonplace feature, the value for startups in this category is to enable users and companies to take actions based on the notes and transcripts. This could range from drafting follow-up emails, or finding time for the next set of meetings, or drawing knowledge from the company database and CRMs to get closer to finalizing a lead. Some companies, such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill, have already started working in this direction.
