While users may be averse to bots visibly taking notes during meetings, many are indifferent if an application on a participant’s computer is performing the transcription. This fundamental aspect has contributed to Granola’s rise, enabling it to secure $125 million in Series C funding led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, with contributions from Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. This has increased the company’s valuation to $1.5 billion, up from $250 million in the previous funding round.

The company also noted that current investors like Lightspeed, Spark, and NFDG took part in this financing round. Following this round, which is less than a year since its $43 million round, the startup has accumulated $192 million in total funding.

Transitioning from a prosumer application that operates on your computer, transcribes meetings, and produces notes, Granola has been developing features tailored for enterprise use. For example, last year, it began allowing team members to collaborate on notes. It has now established its presence in companies such as Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Lovable, Decagon, and Mistral AI, according to its claims.

Alongside the fundraising announcement, Granola is introducing a feature called Spaces, which essentially act as workspaces for teams. Users can also create Folders within these spaces. Spaces have detailed controls determining who can access specific sections. Users can search for notes from Spaces and folders individually.

The company acknowledges that AI meeting notes are now ubiquitous, with numerous providers offering this capability. Consequently, after launching a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in February, the company is unveiling two new APIs for integrating the context of notes into AI workflows.

Granola has introduced a personal API that enables users to access their notes and those shared with them, along with an enterprise API for admins to utilize team context. The personal API is available to business and enterprise plan users, while the enterprise API is exclusive to enterprise clients.

The API introduction follows dissatisfaction from several users, including an a16z partner, over Granola’s decision to restrict its local database, disrupting on-device AI agent workflows previously established. Granola co-founder Chris Pedregal explained that the intent was not to restrict data but to reorganize how the local cache managed AI workflows. This alteration affected the agent workflows. Pedregal pledged at that time that Granola would release APIs to facilitate bulk data access and promised to find a solution for compatibility with local AI agents.

The company indicated that it is updating its MCP server to allow users to view notes in folders and notes that have been shared with them. It highlighted that its app is already compatible with tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable, Figma Make, Replit, Manus, v0, Bolt.new, Duckbill, and Dreamer, and the startup is actively pursuing additional partnerships.

As the practice of taking meeting notes becomes standard, startups in this field should focus on empowering users and businesses to act on the notes and transcriptions. This could involve writing follow-up emails, scheduling subsequent meetings, or extracting knowledge from company databases and CRMs to assist in finalizing leads. Several companies, including Read AI, Fireflies, and Quill, are already moving in this direction.