Why Lightspeed is leading a $4.25M Seed in Granola

Today, Lightspeed is announcing that we’re leading a $4.25M seed investment in Granola, a latest, London-based company with a daring vision to construct the context-aware workspace of the longer term. Founded by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson, Granola goals to alter the way in which all of us work through tools that deeply understand us, anticipate our actions, and augment our abilities. Though Granola is just getting began, we imagine latest breakthroughs in large language models, combined with Chris and Sam’s compelling vision for the longer term, and their best-in-class consumer product experience sets the corporate up well to dramatically improve how all of us work.

Nonetheless, our conviction within the Granola team began long before they’d even conceived of the thought for the product. Around a decade ago, I met Chris in NYC as he was constructing his previous startup, Socratic, and I used to be constructing my company, Anchor. We bonded over our passion for powerful, yet easy to make use of consumer products and hyper rapid iteration that enabled us each to hack our option to product market fit. Even then, Chris had a robust vision for the way technology could possibly be leveraged to assist make us smarter. Within the case of Socratic, it was through a mobile app which helped students with their homework through the use of computer vision and AI. Way before LLMs were the good thing in tech, Chris and his team were in a position to deliver an AI-first consumer product that provided real value to tens of thousands and thousands of scholars, and was ultimately acquired by Google.

Within the years that followed, Chris would occasionally share with me his ideas for brand new consumer products. Most recently, he shared that he was constructing a latest AI-powered product with one other passionate and expert product builder, Sam Stephenson. Upon learning more about their idea and attending to know Sam, we realized that the 2 were an ideal combination. Sam complemented Chris’ strong product vision and consumer go-to market ingenuity with the design skills to make complex experiences not only accessible, but beautiful. Plus, Sam had a compelling vision for the way “tools for pondering” could possibly be made each more powerful and easier for consumer audiences to understand, with the assistance of AI. After they showed us what they were constructing, it became clear that the mixture of those two founders working on this product at this exact moment in time had the potential to end in a generational company.

So what exactly are Chris and Sam constructing with Granola? While we don’t wish to spoil their surprise, we will share that they’re crafting a game-changing product that infuses the magic of recent code editors (IDEs) into on a regular basis tasks like taking meeting notes, composing documents, scheduling meetings, and replying to emails. Chris and Sam imagine that by tapping into the ability of huge language models (LLMs), Granola can revolutionize knowledge work, making it as seamless and enjoyable as coding with a contemporary IDE and GitHub CoPilot. They imagine days of using “dumb text editors” for knowledge work will soon be a distant memory, replaced by smart tools that effortlessly grasp your context, predict your actions, and amplify your skills. If early iterations of the product are any indication, we very much share their belief.

We’re also excited that Chris and Sam are constructing Granola IRL of their home city of London. At Lightspeed, we imagine London is quickly emerging as one in every of the world’s central hubs for AI-first product builders. We’re excited to see how Granola adds to this growing community as they assemble a world class team at their latest office. The team is currently hiring a founding engineer to play a fundamental role in shaping the corporate and the product moving forward.

We’re on the cusp of a latest era where intelligent tools empower us to unleash our full potential and deal with what truly matters. We imagine Chris and Sam’s product will play an enormous part on this future, and we will’t wait to see its transformative impact within the years ahead. By bridging the gap between modern code editors and on a regular basis tasks, Granola is poised to redefine the way in which we work, communicate, and collaborate.

-By Michael Mignano, Julie Kainz, Faraz Fatemi, and Paul Murphy