The AI-powered note-taking tool Granola is falling into rolls. The startup has been using it a year ago thanks to word-of-mouth reviews between VCS and its founder, but it seems to be the fact that big drivers use it to do more than their core pitch.
Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal told TechCrunch that its users are increasingly using Granola to take personal notes. “(People) have granola open all day because there are so many meetings, so it’s like they’re starting to live there,” he said.
According to Pedregal, Granola’s organic popularity among the tech crowd and diverse use cases helped to increase by 10% each week from its launch, but it doesn’t specify the number of users it currently has.
Behind its rapid growth and popularity, Granola said Wednesday it raised $43 million in a Series B funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross venture company NFDG at a $250 million valuation.
The round also saw participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Spark, as well as angel investors such as Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, Replit’s Amjad Masad, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke and Linear’s Karri Saarinen. The round will increase the company’s total funding to $67 million.
In addition to this funding, Granola is expanding its mission to make it more useful for businesses beyond the current single-user focus. This launches a new collaboration feature that allows users to share notes with their teammates and transcripts, allowing the app’s AI to take advantage of the wide pool of notes for surface insights.
Users within an organization can create custom folders for a variety of collaborative use cases, including sales calls, customer feedback, and hiring. The app also allows users to share meeting notes with people who do not use Granola and chat with AI to ask questions.
Other meeting transcription and note-taking apps such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Otter already offer similar shared space features. But Pedregal says Granola is more than attention. “The difference between Granola and other note takers is that it’s very personal and you’re always in control. You can edit notes at any time. It’s not just about capturing meetings, it’s a space where you can work, and even posting meetings,” he said.
Earlier this month, Granola updated the app so that users can ask AI bot questions about all meetings they’ve recorded. Based on that, the company now allows users to ask questions about specific folders as well.
Granola’s new co-focus is part of a broader trend. Many AI-powered conference transcription and note-taking tools are expanding their focus with other tools and are trying to become hubs where users can search through knowledge from a variety of sources.
Meanwhile, the productivity suite has introduced transcription tools to prevent customers from using other apps for that purpose. For example, yesterday’s concept started the AI conference notes tape tool.
Mike Mignano of Lightspeed believes granola has an advantage in this space due to its interface and user experience.
“From the start, the company has been a good mix of AI transcription and human control of taking notes. Now, the product is stronger as it allows you to build context and share notes across meetings. These features allow Granola to have a long-term context for users and teams, kicking the network effects of startups.