Users may not like a bot visibly taking notes during a meeting, but many people don’t care if an app on someone’s computer is doing the transcription. This is the core reason behind granola’s popularity, and helped it secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Index Ventures’ Danny Reimer with participation from Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid. As a result, the company’s valuation has increased to $1.5 billion from $250 million at the time of the previous round, the company said.
The company said existing investors including Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG also participated in the round. The startup has raised $192 million in funding, less than a year after a $43 million round.
Granola has built capabilities well-suited for the enterprise stack, starting with prosumer apps that reside on your computer, transcribe meetings, and generate notes. For example, last year, teammates could now collaborate on notes. It has now compromised companies such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI.
Along with the funding announcement, Granola is also adding a feature called Spaces. This is basically your team’s workspace. You can also create folders within this workspace. Spaces give you detailed control over who can access what parts. Users can query notes for spaces and folders individually.
The company understands that AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity at this point, with many players offering this capability. That’s why, after introducing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is introducing two new APIs to integrate note context into AI workflows.
Granola now includes a Personal API that allows users to access their own notes and shared notes, and an Enterprise API that allows admins to interact with team context. Personal APIs are available to Business and Enterprise plan users, and Enterprise APIs are available only to Enterprise users.
The API rollout comes after many users, including a16z partners, were furious with Granola for locking down their local database and breaking the AI agent workflows on the devices they had configured. Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal revealed that while the company didn’t want to lock down its data, the startup decided to change the way it stored data because local cache wasn’t designed to handle AI workflows. This move broke the agent’s workflow. Pedregal promised at the time that Granola would launch an API that would give users bulk access to their data. He also said the company will find ways to collaborate with local AI agents.
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The company also said it is updating its MCP servers to allow users to view notes in folders and notes shared with users. The company’s app already connects with tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, and the startup said it is working on bringing more partners on board.
As meeting note-taking becomes a common feature, the value for startups in this category is to enable users and businesses to take action based on notes and transcripts. This includes drafting follow-up emails, finding time for the next series of meetings, and pulling knowledge from company databases 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.
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