Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation for enterprise AI pivot

Granola has secured $125 million in Series C funding, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. The round was led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with participation from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. Existing investors including Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG also participated in the round. This funding comes less than a year after the startup’s $43 million round, bringing its total amount raised to $192 million. The new valuation of $1.5 billion is up from $250 million as of its last round.

Granola is expanding from a meeting notetaker to an enterprise AI app. The startup, which began as a prosumer application that transcribes meetings and generates notes on a user’s computer, is building features to suit an enterprise stack. Last year, the company started allowing teammates to collaborate on notes. It has now made inroads into enterprises such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI.

With the funding, Granola is introducing “Spaces,” which are workspaces for teams that feature folders and granular access controls. Users can query notes from Spaces and folders separately. Additionally, after introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server—a standard for connecting AI assistants to data sources—in February, the company is launching two new APIs to integrate note context into AI workflows:

• A personal API that lets people access their notes and notes shared with them, available to users on business and enterprise plans.
• An enterprise API to let administrators work with team context, available only to enterprise users.
• An updated MCP server that lets users see notes in folders and notes shared with them.

The API launch follows recent friction with its user base. Specifically, users, including an a16z partner, were mad at Granola for locking down its local database and breaking on-device AI agent workflows they had set up. (Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, is a major US venture capital firm.) Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal clarified that the company did not want to lock down data, but its local cache was not designed to handle AI workflows, and the startup decided to change how it stored the data. While this move broke the agent workflows, Pedregal promised at that time that Granola would launch APIs for users to access data in bulk and would figure out a way to work with local AI agents.

Why it matters

Granola is moving from a crowded meeting notes market to an enterprise AI infrastructure play, betting that the real value lies in enabling automated actions across company data rather than just transcription. As meeting note-taking becomes a commonplace feature, the value for startups in this category is to enable users and companies to take actions based on notes and transcripts, such as drafting follow-up emails or drawing knowledge from company databases.