The artificial intelligence meeting recording application, Granola, has been experiencing rapid growth recently. Since its launch a year ago, this startup product has achieved a weekly user growth rate of 10%. The rise of Granola is not only due to the word-of-mouth spread between the founding team and investors but also because of its core selling point that goes beyond "automatic meeting recording." It has gradually become an "AI assistant" for users to integrate personal and work information.
Granola Co-founder Chris Pedregal told TechCrunch that users are now more often using Granola for personal notes, so they can obtain insights through its AI analysis of daily content. "It is no longer just a meeting tool; it's more like where they start their day," he said.
Driven by rapid growth, Granola announced that it has completed a $43 million Series B funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's venture capital company NFDG, with a valuation of $250 million. Existing investors Lightspeed and Spark participated in the follow-up investment, and notable entrepreneurs such as Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, Amjad Masad from Replit, Tobias Lütke from Shopify, and Karri Saarinen from Linear also joined as angel investors. After this round of financing, Granola's total financing amount reached $67 million.
This financing also marks Granola's accelerated expansion into team collaboration scenarios. The newly launched collaboration features allow users to share notes and transcripts, and let the AI provide richer intelligent analysis based on shared content. Users can establish custom folders for sales, customer feedback, recruitment, and other scenarios according to their needs. They can even share meeting records with people who do not use Granola and interact with the AI.
Although competitors like Read AI, Fireflies, and Otter also offer shared space features, Pedregal emphasized that Granola's differentiation lies in its personalization and user-driven editing capabilities. "It is not just a meeting recorder; it is a platform for collaboration, work, and even content publication."
In addition, Granola upgraded its AI question-and-answer feature this month. It can answer questions based on all meeting records and support asking questions for specific folders. This function strengthens its positioning as a "knowledge hub."
Granola's development aligns with industry trends. More and more AI meeting tools are transitioning into knowledge management platforms and competing with productivity tools like Notion. Mike Mignano, a partner at Lightspeed, believes Granola has a lasting advantage: "By combining transcription with manual recording and expanding to sharing and contextual understanding, Granola is building a long-term knowledge network with significant potential for network effects."
