Granola's notepad app has become a popular tool among venture capitalists, who use it to record meetings and augment notes with AI technology. This made it easier for the startup to raise $20 million in Series A funding from a large group of investors, and the team was able to raise the funds in about a week.
“I think all the investors who ended up getting a term sheet had been using this for a while,” says Granola co-founder Sam Stephenson.
He said the team received so much inbound interest that they hosted about 12 investor conversations in just one day. “It was very opportunistic. It had to happen at some point, but we were able to get good terms and get it done quickly.”
The company's Series A was led by Spark Capital (Nabil Hyatt), with participation from investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Lightspeed, Betaworks, and First Minute Capital.
Unlike some AI-powered meeting summary tools, Granola's appeal is its collaborative approach. Instead of transcribing a meeting and trying to highlight important points on its own, you can guide the AI by writing down what you think is most important from the meeting, and the AI will help fill in the rest.
Image credit: Granola
To use Granola, install the app on your Mac and connect it with your calendar. Directly transcribe meeting audio when meeting on Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, Teams, or WebEx. You can write notes and bullet points yourself during meetings, or let AI do it all for you. Once the meeting is over, Granola analyzes who attended the meeting, its content, and uses AI to flesh out the notes using the meeting recording. You can also fix typos if you took notes in a hurry.
Since its launch in May, Granola has grown its user base five times, with approximately 5,000 people now using the app every week. The company says 70% of people who use granola for a meeting within the first week of trying it will use granola again. Weekly meetings have also increased sixfold.
And VCs are no longer the company's main customers.
“[Over] 50% of all users were in leadership positions, and a smaller number were investors,” Stevenson said. (In fact, that statistic is now 57%.) “The tables have turned and there are now definitely more non-investors than investors.”
He said many people learn about granola through word of mouth (for example, founders hearing about granola from investors or hearing about granola from other companies in the industry). They then spread the word to their team members and the company, which helps Granola grow.
Image credit: Granola
Since its debut, Granola's team has added new features, including integration with Slack. They are currently working on CRM integration and image support. Soon, Granola will introduce a feature that will show you your past meetings with someone when you meet them again, providing a kind of “contextual history” to help you recall what you last talked about. is.
The company also continues to replace its off-the-shelf AI as better models become available, and this is an ongoing effort. Lately, Stevenson says, AI has started to sound more natural and more like it took notes itself. (Currently, Granola does not train models based on meeting data, but may introduce training on an opt-in basis in the future.)
With the additional funding, Granola aims to make the app a more team-friendly product, develop enterprise pricing plans, and build out the ability to proactively find interesting nuggets and themes from a series of meetings over time. . A mobile app is also likely to arrive next year.
Additionally, this investment will allow Granola to expand its engineering team, which currently stands at five, by hiring four more people.
Prior to its Series A, Granola raised $4.25 million in seed funding from Lightspeed's Michael Mignano, along with Betaworks, First Minute Capital, Mike Krieger, Soleio Cuervo, and others.