Pens, tablets and even laptops have disappeared from meetings with venture capitalists over the last year. That’s because scores of investors have turned to Granola, a viral AI-powered app which hums away in the background, taking notes on deals and startup metrics and offering smart summaries of the conversation.
Since its launch in May 2024, Granola has quickly become a fixture for VCs and increasingly startup founders and operators. Now it’s in talks with investors to raise at a valuation of over $1 billion. Index Ventures will lead a new round of at least $100 million for the London-based startup, according to several sources with knowledge of the financing. That quadrupled its $250 million valuation from a Series B in May 2025, when it raised $43 million in a round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross’s venture firm, NFDG. Granola and Index Ventures declined to comment.
Tech that takes notes for you has become a booming category within AI, as startups and large companies look to tap the summarization and voice detection powers of large language models. That’s sometimes led to some rather strange video calls. Note-taking bots from companies like Otter.AI, Fireflies or Read AI can at times outnumber actual humans on work Zooms.
Unlike rival note-taking apps that join a meeting as a robotic participant, Granola sits in the background on an iPhone or a MacBook, transcribing and generating summarized notes from calls and meetings. That means it’s not always obvious when a work call, or even a coffee meeting, is being taped. This poses ethical issues and even legal problems in locations like California, which requires two-party consent for recordings.
Granola was founded in November 2022 by CEO and cofounder Chris Pedregal, who built and sold education app Socratic to Google in 2018, and cofounder Sam Stephenson, a British product designer. Pedregal and Stephenson have built a loyal following among taste-maker VCs and founders, but are playing catch up against bigger and better capitalized rivals. Otter AI is currently the top downloaded note-taking app in the United States, according to Data.AI, and announced last March that it was bringing in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Productivity startup Notion, which was last valued at $11 billion in an employee share sale last month, launched its own transcription tool last year, while Nasdaq-listed Zoom pushed its AI companion tool to work across Microsoft Teams and Google Meet in September.
