AI-powered notetaking tool Granola has been on a roll. The startup's seen a steep uptick in usage since it launched a year ago, mostly thanks to word of mouth among VCs and founders, but a big driver seems to be the fact that people are using it for doing more than its core pitch — automated notetaking for meetings.
Granola's co-founder, Chris Pedregal, told TechCrunch that the company's users are increasingly using Granola for taking personal notes, which helps them make all their information, both from work and otherwise, available to the app's AI to parse and surface insights from. "[People] have Granola open all day because they have a lot of meetings, so it’s like [...] where they’re starting to live," he said.
Pedregal said Granola's organic popularity among the tech crowd and diversifying use cases has helped its user base grow 10% every week since its launch, though he didn't specify how many users it currently has.
Off the back of that rapid growth and popularity, Granola on Wednesday said it has raised $43 million in a Series B funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's venture firm, NFDG, at a valuation of $250 million.
The round also saw participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Spark, as well as angel investors including Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Replit's Amjad Masad, Shopify's Tobias Lütke, and Linear's Karri Saarinen. The round brings the company's total funding raised to $67 million.
Alongside this funding, Granola is also extending its remit beyond its current single-user focus to make itself more useful for businesses: It's launching a new collaboration feature that lets users share transcripts and notes with teammates, and enable the app's AI take to advantage of a broader pool of notes and details to surface insights.
Users in an organization can create custom folders for various collaborative use cases like sales calls, customer feedback, and hiring. The app will also let users share meeting notes with people who don't use Granola to let them chat with its AI and ask it questions.
Other meeting transcription and notetaking apps, such as Read AI, Fireflies, and Otter, already offer similar shared-space features. Pedregal, though, says Granola is for more than notetaking. "I think how Granola differs from other notetakers is that it is very personal and you are in control all the time. You can edit notes at any point. It is not about just capturing a meeting, but it is a space where you can work, even post meetings," he said.