Granola, a London-based AI note-taking app, has surged to a $1.5 billion valuation just a year after being valued at $250 million, following a fresh $125 million raise.
The headline number is the latest checkpoint in a founder story that starts, fittingly, with meetings. Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson founded Granola in 2023 after connecting through a small community that compared notes on the tools people use to survive modern work.
Together, they realized that note-taking during meetings wasn’t really a problem at all, because what comes after the meetings is usually where the issues start arising. People often leave calls with decisions half-captured, action items scattered, and context trapped in memory.
Why Granola focuses on what happens after meetings
Pedregal, for one, had already lived through the full startup loop. Before Granola, he built Socratic, an education app that Google later acquired. Stephenson brought a design-first approach to the table, and together they decided to build a notepad designed for everyday use in the AI era.
The app, now in the hands of thousands of weekly users, works by quietly transcribing a conversation as it happens. It then uses the transcript along with what you wrote – if anything at all – to generate a structured set of notes and action items once the call ends.
From the beginning, the team emphasized a “local” approach, meaning Granola could run on a user’s computer rather than joining meetings as a bot, because it lowered friction and made the tool easier to adopt inside teams.
How an AI note-taking app turned into a $1.5B startup
That differentiation helped Granola raise early capital quickly. In May 2023, the company raised a $4.25 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with betaworks and Firstminute Capital also participating.
In October 2024, Granola announced a $20 million Series A led by Spark Capital, with participation from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, as well as prior backers.
By May 2025, the AI note-taking app raised $43 million at a $250 million valuation in a Series B led by Friedman and Gross’s firm, NFDG – a round that signaled Granola’s shift from individual use toward collaboration. Reports suggested that Granola, at the time, cited a 10% weekly growth in active users since launch, though total users were not disclosed.
This week’s $125 million Series C, led by Index Ventures with participation from Kleiner Perkins, is tied to that same arc – though one that seems to be speeding up, fast.
Now, Granola is taking a step beyond individual users by tailoring its offering toward enterprises. The London-based startup has announced that it is rolling out team “Spaces,” organizational controls, and APIs designed to let companies integrate meeting context into broader AI workflows.
