AI note-taking app Granola raises $43 million to create a new hub for personal enterprise knowledge management

Image source:Granola

AI-powered note-taking tool Granola is gaining momentum. The startup has seen a surge in users since launching a year ago, thanks largely to word-of-mouth among its venture capitalists and founders, but a key driver seems to be people expanding its use beyond its core function of automated meeting note-taking.

Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal said more and more users are starting to use Granola for taking personal notes, which helps make all the information the app's AI processes and extracts insights from - both at work and otherwise - fully utilized. "People have Granola on all day because they have a lot of meetings, so it's like the place where they start their lives," he said.

Pedregal said Granola's natural popularity among the tech crowd and diverse usage scenarios have led to a user base that has grown by 10% per week since launch, though he did not disclose the exact number of current users.

Building on this rapid growth and popularity, Granola announced on May 14th that it had closed a Series B round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross' NFDG, raising $43 million and valuing the company at $250 million.

The round also attracted participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Spark, as well as angel investors including Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Replit's Amjad Massad, Shopify's Tobias Lütke and Linear's Kari Saarinen. The round brings the company's total funding to $67 million.

Photo credit: Granola

Along with this round of funding, Granola is expanding its offerings from single-user scenarios to enterprise applications: launching a new collaboration feature that allows users to share meeting transcripts and notes with team members, and leveraging a broader pool of notes data to allow AI to distill deeper insights.

Business users can create custom folders for collaboration scenarios such as sales calls, customer feedback, recruiting, and more. The app also supports sharing meeting notes to non-Granola users so they can ask questions in conversation with the AI.

Other conference transcription apps such as Read AI, Fireflies and Otter already offer similar shared space features. But Pedregal emphasizes that Granola is more than just notes: "I think what differentiates Granola is that it's highly personalized and controlled. You can edit your notes at any time, and it's not just a tool for taking notes, it's a space for ongoing work after the meeting. "

Earlier this month, Granola updated its app to enable users to ask the AI bot questions related to all recorded sessions. On top of that, the company will now also allow users to ask questions about specific folders.

Photo credit: Granola

Granola's new collaboration features follow a broader trend - many AI-powered meeting transcription and note-taking tools are expanding their reach and building integrations with other tools in an attempt to become a central hub for storing and allowing users to retrieve knowledge across multiple sources.

Meanwhile, productivity suites are introducing transcription tools to prevent users from turning to other apps for that purpose. Notion, for example, released an AI meeting note-taking tool yesterday.

Lightspeed's Mike Mignano believes Granola has an advantage in this area with its interface and user experience.

"From the beginning, this company has had just the right combination of AI transcription and manual note taking. Now they're building cross-conference context and making notes shareable, with product strengths as a result. With these capabilities, Granola will provide long-term context for users and teams, kick-starting a network effect for the startup," he said.

References:https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/14/ai-note-taking-app-granola-raises-43m-at-250m-valuation-launches-collaborative-features/