Granola raises $125M, hits $1.5B valuation as it expands from meeting notetaker to enterprise AI app

Users may not like bots in meetings for appearing to take notes, but many of them don’t mind if an app on someone’s computer does the transcribing. That’s the main reason for Granola’s popularity, which helped him secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This raised the company’s value to $1.5 billion, it said, up from $250 million from the previous round.

The company said existing investors such as Lightspeed, Spark and NFDG also participated in the round. 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, records meetings, and generates notes, Granola has been building features that fit the business stack. For example, last year, it started allowing colleagues to collaborate on notes. It has now entered businesses such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, it said.

With the fundraising announcement, Granola also added a feature called Spaces, which are team workspaces. You can also create Folders within this workspace. Spaces have granular controls around who can access which part. Users can query notes in Spaces and folders separately.

The company understands that AI meeting notes are becoming a commodity right now, with many players offering this feature. That’s why, after launching the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is introducing two new APIs to integrate context notes into AI workflows.

Granola now has a personal API that lets people access their notes and notes shared with them, as well as a business API to let administrators work in a group context. The Personal API is available to users in business and enterprise applications and the Enterprise API is available only to enterprise users.

The API launch comes after a number of users, including our a16z partner, were furious with Granola for locking up its local database and breaking the on-device AI agent workflow they had set up. Granola’s founder, Chris Pedregal, clarified that the company didn’t want to lock up data, but its on-premise storage wasn’t designed to handle AI workflows, and the startup decided to change the way it stores data. That move breaks the agent’s workflow. Pedregal promised at the time that Granola would introduce APIs for users to access data in bulk. He also said that the company will find a way to work with local AI agents.

The company said it is also updating its MCP server to allow users to see notes in shared folders and notes. It noted that its app is already connected with tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dremer, and the startup is working to bring more partners on board.

As meeting note-taking becomes a common feature, the value of implementation in this category is to allow users and companies to take actions based on notes and transcripts. This could range from writing follow-up emails, or finding time for the next set of meetings, or drawing information from company databases and CRMs to get you closer to finalizing a lead. Other companies, such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill, have already started working in this way.