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Granola started out as a note-taking app for meetings, but like all great startup Trojan Horses, it’s becoming a full-blown enterprise platform. After raising a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation this week, Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher caught up with co-founder Sam Stephenson to find out where it’s heading next.
He told the Pathfounders Podcast: “The motivation for us building Granola has always been that we really want to be in the business of making the interfaces and the experiences that let knowledge workers… do their work faster, more efficiently. Notes weren't really the goal. The goal was always just to help you with the work. For us to be good at doing that job we first need to… earn the right to be a part of your life and plugged-into the communication that you're doing… Mission one for us was being able to transcribe the meetings that you're that you're in day in, day out.”
Granola is a prosumer app works on phones and desktops, transcribes meetings, and generates notes. But by allowing colleagues to collaborate on notes its turned into a full-stack app, picking up customers such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI.
Asked if companies have questioned if their data can leak via the AI platform, Stephenson said: “Yeah, I think it's the number one question that every enterprise customer comes to us with when we start talking to them… When you purchase an enterprise license with us we have zero data retention contracts with all of the LLM providers.. We might use data to train models to provide a better experience, but always only in a way where the company data is siloed.”
He added that he “could see a world” where companies could have a company-specific model that's really good at understanding their company's acronyms, for instance.
Granola’s popularity stems from not having bots in online and offline meetings visibly taking notes. That helped it secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins.
Existing investors Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG also participated in the round as well. which arrived less than a year after its $43 million round. This means it’s now raised a total of $192 million.
It’s now launched Spaces, or workspaces for a team, which also allows the creation of Folders inside, with granular access controls to query to content.
There is now a personal API for individuals and an enterprise API to let admins work with a team context.
Its also updating its MCP server to let users see notes in folders and notes shared with them, allowing connection with Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer.
Granola was founded by Chris Pedregal. Chris also founded Socratic, an AI-powered tutor for high school students, which grew organically to 10+million MAUs and won “App of the Year” in 2017. In 2018, Socratic was acquired by Google, where it gets 4+billion questions a year. In early 2023, he left Google to experiment with Large Language Models before meeting Sam and founding Granola together.
Stephenson spent a few years in San Francisco at a design agency and an education non-profit, eventually launching a platform connecting neighbourhoods to local farmers through building an iOS app for Swim Smooth. He also worked at Ideaflow, a start-up building a note-taking app, before leaving last year to build Granola.