AI-powered note-taking startup Granola continues to gather momentum, announcing today that it raised $43 million in a Series B funding round led by the venture firm NFDG, co-founded by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. The round brings Granola’s total funding to date up to $67 million and values the rapidly expanding company at approximately $250 million.
The latest investment round also attracted participation from previous investors Lightspeed and Spark, along with notable angel investors such as Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, Amjad Masad of Replit, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke, and Linear’s Karri Saarinen. This influx of capital positions Granola strongly as it pivots to capitalize on its widening popularity in professional and tech-centric communities.
Since launching just over a year ago, Granola has quickly evolved beyond its initial functionality—capturing automated notes from meetings. Users are now employing the app extensively for personal note-taking, enabling the platform’s AI features to parse and provide deeper insights across various content types. Co-founder Chris Pedragel explained that people increasingly keep Granola open throughout the workday, making it central to their workflows and personal productivity efforts, resulting in a 10% weekly growth rate since the product first debuted.
Alongside the funding, Granola has unveiled new collaborative capabilities, expanding from a primarily individual-use application into a more team-oriented platform. These new features allow users to create shared folders and enable teams to collaboratively access transcripts, notes, and generated insights. Users can leverage this pooled content to ask Granola’s AI questions specific to the information stored in shared folders, enhancing the platform’s utility within larger organizations. Additionally, users can share meeting notes externally with non-Granola users, allowing them to interact directly with the app’s AI to draw deeper knowledge from meeting content.
Granola joins an increasingly competitive field that already includes established AI-driven productivity tools like Read AI, Fireflies, and Otter, each of which supports collaborative note sharing and integration features. Yet, according to Pedragel, Granola differentiates itself by providing users with a greater sense of personalization, control, and ongoing editability, presenting it as not merely a meeting transcription tool but a daily productivity space. He notes that Granola’s emphasis extends beyond simply capturing conversations—its goal is to become an integrated working environment.
Earlier this month, Granola also rolled out updates allowing users to query the AI chatbot with questions about all recorded sessions across their individual accounts, further bolstering its offering as a unified productivity hub.
The landscape of AI-powered productivity apps has grown significantly crowded lately, with major productivity platforms and competitors rapidly deploying transcription and collaboration enhancements. For instance, Notion recently announced a similar meeting transcribing feature to attract professional users. Nonetheless, Lightspeed investor Mike Mignano expresses strong confidence in Granola’s focused approach and carefully honed user experience. Mignano believes Granola’s unique mix of automated AI transcription and intuitive manual note management will actively build a powerful, sticky user base that benefits from broad and long-lasting network effects.
