Taking notes from meetings can be a pain, so why not leave it to AI? That's the premise behind new startup Granola. The company's AI-powered notepad app lets you combine your own notes with notes created by AI based on meeting notes. Unlike other AI transcription apps that try to summarize meeting points on their own, Granola uses AI to take a more collaborative approach. You can also guide the AI by writing down the most important talking points from the meeting and allow it to fill in the details.
Co-founder Chris Pedregal says he was inspired to develop granola after using GPT-3 when it was new. He experimented with various prototypes to understand how AI can help in daily life. The usefulness of AI was what inspired him to create his previous company, his Socratic. This is an AI tutor app that can take pictures of homework problems and teach users how to solve them. The company was sold to Google, and Pedregal remained with the tech giant for several years before trying to start a company again.
By building various tools, including at one point an AI journaling app, I realized something.
“Through that process, the LLM [large language models] “We are changing the tools we use at work, especially when it comes to spoken language and its usefulness,” Pedregal said.
Image credit: Granola Image credit: Granola
He then teamed up with co-founder Sam Stephenson, who previously worked at note-taking app Ideaflow. The two initially met through a meetup group focused on meeting tools. Like Pedregal, Stephenson was based in London, so the two eventually met in person and hit it off. “Now we're basically married,” Stephenson joked.
The two founded Granola in March 2023 with the goal of making it easier to manage meeting notes.
“Especially since the pandemic, people are spending an unusual amount of time in meetings, especially Zoom meetings,” Pedregal said. Many people are in meetings all day long and don't have time to review, write, or organize their notes in advance. Additionally, for most people, the only time they take notes is in meetings. They are less likely to take notes in other areas of their lives. ”
Granola is working to solve the problem of note-taking with an app that is essentially an AI-powered evolution of apps like Apple Notes. When you interact with Granola on your computer, you can choose to write notes and bullet points yourself, or let the AI do everything for you. The app works by connecting to your calendar and transcribing audio directly from your Mac. This means that unlike other solutions, meeting bots do not participate in online meetings. Currently, Granola works with his Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, and WebEx.
The app essentially works like a regular notepad, so you can type up your own notes during a meeting. But Granola analyzes who's in the meeting, their roles, and what the meeting was about (for example, a sales call, a job interview, or an investor pitch). Once the meeting is over, Granola fleshes out your notes by referencing the transcript, adding more information along the way. And if you make a typo or forget a capitalization, Granola handles that while it cleans up, too.
Image Credit: GranolaImage Credit: Granola
For example, if someone says during a meeting that the budget for a project is 10,000, you can simply write “10,000'' in your notes. When Granola returns, it will be expanded to include more information, such as “The budget for the photo shoot can be up to 10,000 yen.”
Image Credit: GranolaImage Credit: Granola
Granola's notes are hyperlinked to summaries of the transcript so you can check for accuracy or see the full extent of what was said. The AI's notes are written in grey to distinguish them from my own notes, which are written in black.
The app uses Open-AI's GPT-4o, so you can use GPT-4o as well as ChatGPT.
Pedregal believes Granola is superior to other meeting transcription tools. The reason is that Granola not only summarizes meetings through AI, but also allows you to create your own notes and collaborate with AI. For example, using markdown formatting, you can guide the AI by typing a heading after the number sign, and the AI will know to add a bullet point below that referencing that topic.
“Right now we outsource a lot of our thinking to LLMs like ChatGPt, and we have very little control over it,” Pedregal says. “If you ask ChatGPt to write you an email, it does it magically. But to actually get it to write an email to send is very difficult. It takes too much work. I think that's a big question now: How do we design AI so that we can maintain control? We still need judgement, but can the AI help us do our best work?”
Image credit: Granola Image credit: Granola
Fueling Granola launched with a $4.25 million funding round that closed last year and was led by Lightspeed. Other investors include Betaworks, Firstmination Capital, Others, Uncommon, and angels such as: mike krieger, SoleioHunter Walk, david reeveMike Hudak, Gabor Sell, Andrew Parker.
In the long term, Pedregal said the team wants to expand beyond meetings to anything related to next steps, such as taking notes, filing bug reports, and scheduling follow-ups.
Granola is free for the first 25 meetings, then a reasonable $10 per month after that. Over time, the startup hopes to launch adjustable-priced team or company plans to generate additional revenue. The app is free to download on macOS.