Granola’s notepad app has turn out to be a preferred tool amongst enterprise capitalists who use it to record meetings and augment notes using AI technology. That made it easier for the startup to boost funds from a crowd of investors for its $20 million Series A — something the team managed to do in about every week.
“I believe all of the investors that we got term sheets from ultimately had been using this for some time,” says Granola co-founder Sam Stephenson.
He says the team had received a variety of inbound interest, so that they hosted roughly a dozen investor conversations in only sooner or later. “It was a really opportunistic thing. We might have needed to do it sooner or later, but we were capable of get good terms and get it over with in a short time.”
The corporate’s Series A was led by Spark Capital (Nabeel Hyatt) with participation from investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Lightspeed, Betaworks, Firstminute Capital, and others.
Unlike some AI-powered meeting summary tools, Granola’s appeal is its collaborative approach. As a substitute of transcribing the meeting after which attempting to spotlight the important thing points by itself, you may guide the AI by writing down what you’re thinking that are a very powerful takeaways out of your meeting, and the AI helps by filling in the remaining.
To make use of Granola, you put in the app in your Mac and connect it together with your calendar. It is going to then transcribe your meeting’s audio directly whenever you meet over Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, Teams, and WebEx. In the course of the meeting, you may write your individual notes or bullet points, or leave all of it as much as the AI. After the meeting wraps, Granola analyzes who was within the meeting, and what it was about, after which uses AI to flesh out your notes using the meeting’s transcript. It may possibly also clean up your typos in case you jotted things down in a rush.
Since launching in May, Granola has grown its user base by 5x and now sees around 5,000 people using the app on a weekly basis. Seventy percent of people that use Granola for a gathering inside their first week of trying it return to make use of it again, in accordance with the corporate. Weekly meetings have also grown by 6x.
And VCs aren’t any longer its primary customers.
“[Over] 50% of all of the users were in a leadership position, and investors were a smaller chunk than that,” Stephenson says. (The stat is now 57%, the truth is.) “The tables have flipped, and we now definitely have more non-investors than investors.”
He says many are finding Granola through word-of-mouth — like founders hearing about it from their investors, for instance — or from other peers of their industry. Later, they pass the word along to members of their team or inside the company, which has been helping Granola grow.
Since its debut, Granola’s team has been adding recent features, like integrations with Slack. They’re now working on CRM integrations and support for images. Soon, Granola will introduce a feature that can display the past meetings you’ve had with someone whenever you meet with them again, providing a kind of “context history” that may also help jog your memory regarding what you last talked about.
The corporate also continues to swap out the off-the-shelf AI as higher models turn out to be available, which is ongoing work. More recently, Stephenson says the AI has gotten higher at sounding more natural and more such as you had taken your individual notes. (Granola just isn’t training models in your meeting data for now, nevertheless it may introduce that in an opt-in basis further down the road.)
With the extra funds, Granola goals to make the app more of a product for teams, develop an enterprise pricing plan, and construct features that would proactively find interesting nuggets and themes from a set of meetings over time. A mobile app will likely arrive next 12 months, as well.
As well as, the investment allows Granola to expand its engineering team, now five, by hiring 4 more people.
Ahead of its Series A, Granola raised $4.25 million in seed funding from Michael Mignano at Lightspeed, together with Betaworks, Firstminute Capital, Mike Krieger, Soleio Cuervo, and others.
