Granola Raises $43M to Supercharge Its AI Note-Taking and Collaboration Features
If you’ve ever struggled to keep up during a fast-moving meeting—or found yourself drowning in scattered notes—you’re not alone. But the good news? An AI-powered note-taking tool called Granola is here to change the game. And now, with a brand-new $43 million funding round under its belt, Granola is gearing up to make collaborative, intelligent note-taking easier and faster than ever before.
What Is Granola, and Why Should You Care?
At its core, Granola is an AI-driven note-taking app designed to save people time and frustration. Think of it like having a super-organized teammate who listens in on your meetings, takes precise notes, highlights which tasks are assigned to whom, and even recalls important decisions—without you lifting a finger.
The app launched in 2023 and quickly gained popularity with busy professionals, students, and teams that juggle multiple meetings each day. Now, thanks to this latest funding round led by Benchmark, Granola is looking to do a lot more than just jot down notes—it’s stepping into the world of real-time teamwork and collaboration.
The Big News: $43 Million Raised & a $250M Valuation
Granola’s recent Series B funding round brought in $43 million, boosting the company’s total funding to $60 million. This new round values the startup at $250 million—an impressive number for a company that’s only been around for about two years.
Investors are clearly confident in Granola’s mission to reimagine how professionals capture and collaborate on information. Benchmark general partner Sarah Tavel, known for investing in major startups like Chainalysis and Hipcamp, led the investment and now joins Granola’s board of directors.
Why Investors Are Backing Granola
- Strong demand for smarter workplace tools
- An AI-first approach not just to note-taking, but to decision tracking and task management
- Impressive adoption by companies like Vercel and Ramp
- A product built for the modern, often remote, workforce
It’s worth noting that many professionals experience “meeting fatigue” or struggle to remember action items discussed 30 minutes ago. Granola aims to fix that problem with artificial intelligence that thinks one—or several—steps ahead.
The Coolest New Feature: Real-Time Collaboration
Up until now, Granola has mostly been known as a solo note-taking assistant. But that’s changing. The latest update introduces real-time collaboration, letting multiple users view, add to, and interact with the notes as a meeting unfolds.
Here’s how that could help:
- Team members can highlight action items in real-time
- You can assign tasks as they come up—with no post-meeting follow-up needed
- Everyone stays on the same page during complex discussions
The collaboration tools are part of Granola’s effort to serve entire teams and organizations, not just individual users. And let’s be honest—who doesn’t want one source of truth for everything that happened in a meeting?
The Brains Behind Granola: A Product Built from Personal Experience
Granola was founded by David Adler, a former engineer at Scale AI. Like many of us, Adler often found himself in back-to-back meetings with little time to actually capture what was discussed, let alone remember who was doing what afterward.
So, he built a tool to do just that. He focused on making the AI not only accurate but also policy-friendly—meaning it doesn’t record or store full audio or video, making it easier for companies to adopt it without legal concerns.
What really sets Granola apart, according to Adler, is that it was designed from the bottom up with AI at the heart of the system—not just as a bolt-on feature. That means everything from note formatting to task extraction is done with machine learning in mind.
How Does Granola Work? A Quick Breakdown
So, how does Granola actually capture what’s happening in your meetings?
- It joins Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meetings as a participant
- Listens to the conversation in real-time
- Uses AI to extract key points, action items, and decisions
- Automatically categorizes and formats the notes for easy reading
- Let’s you search and access past meetings from an intuitive dashboard
That sounds pretty useful, right? Especially when you’re juggling multiple projects and can’t afford to let things slip through the cracks.
Privacy-First AI: No Recording Worries
One concern many users have with AI note takers is privacy. Are my conversations being recorded and stored forever? With Granola, the answer is no.
The platform is built to avoid persistent recordings. Instead of capturing everything, it only turns conversation chunks into notes and discards the raw audio. That means Granola never stores sensitive data like recordings or raw transcripts, making it easier to get buy-in from IT and legal teams.
Who’s Already Using It?
Granola has already found loyal fans in companies like Ramp, Vercel, and Sourcegraph, where productivity is a top priority. Internal teams report spending far less time on follow-up emails or wondering, “What did we decide on that again?”
Granola is especially helpful for:
- Project managers juggling multiple stakeholders
- Engineers navigating complex technical discussions
- Sales teams who want quick access to call summaries
- Executives tracking strategic decisions across departments
Final Thoughts: Could Granola Be Your Next Productivity Hack?
If you’ve ever exited a meeting feeling like your brain just ran a marathon, you’re not alone. Granola is aiming to solve a big, everyday problem: capturing important conversations without slowing anyone down.
With $43 million in fresh funding, a $250 million valuation, and new real-time collaboration tools rolling out, Granola is setting a new standard for what AI-powered note-taking apps can do.
So, whether you’re managing a remote team or just trying to make your day a little less chaotic, Granola might be worth trying. After all, who wouldn’t want a smart assistant that remembers everything—so you don’t have to?
Keywords used:
AI note-taking app, Granola app, AI-powered productivity tools, collaborative note taking, Zoom meeting assistant, real-time meeting notes, meeting summaries, AI workplace tools