AI-powered notepad Granola secured $20M in Series A funding

Granola, an AI-enhanced note-taking app, recently announced it has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from investors including AI Grant, Lightspeed, Betaworks, and Firstminute Capital. The startup smartly differentiates itself from its competitors by smartly picking a frequent strategy, where AI-powered notetaking is marketed as a replacement for human note-takers, inadvertently painting notetaking as more of a chore than what it really is: a tool for thinking. Since writing is a tool for thinking, Granola tells us, we should strive to enhance it, not replace it (or outsource it to a meeting bot).

Granola expects its users will want to remain present and in control, taking notes on what matters to them. In parallel, Granola transcribes what it hears, and then uses the collected information to enhance the users' notes. With time, Granola becomes a searchable, queryable, and shareable conversation archive. The transcribing function works without requiring meeting bots to join into calls, and the app lets users create templates according to the meeting types they take notes for, such as sales calls, pitches, 1 on 1s. It also creates links to enable easy shareability and features an AI chat that can analyze deeper to unearth additional insights or support the creation of other documents, such as follow-up emails.

The company notes how it launched with a message that has resonated with its user community: "if you think your judgment is valuable, you should not outsource that judgment to AI." Granola claims over half of its users are in leadership roles, including leaders at unicorns Vercel, Ramp, and Roblox; and partners at VC firms like Benchmark, Sequoia, and Accel. Moreover, it reports a 6x weekly increase in users, and a remarkable retention rate: those trying Granola continue using the app about 10 weeks later in approximately 6 meetings per week.

The company recognizes the role of these impressive statistics in its success in raising new capital, which will boost product development, including the launch of a Windows app—Granola is Mac-only at the moment, but it has an open waitlist for its Windows app launch. The app is free to try for 25 meetings and offers a Pro subscription for $10 monthly per user which removes the 25-meeting limit.