Granola raises $125M Series C at $1.5B valuation to become the enterprise context layer for AI agents

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What's going on, guys? I'm good. I'm good. How you doing?

Congratulations. Massive news. Tell us what happened. Let's hit the gong. Let's warm things up since we're in our Lambda Lightning round now. I want to hear what happened. So, we have raised a $125 million series C from uh Index Ventures.

Congratulations.

I didn't hear it over the sound of the gong. You said Index Ventures.

Index Ventures. Index Ventures. Um and uh and with uh KP participating as well.

Fantastic.

Uh what unlocked the round? Is it just continued progress, new features, a little bit of everything? Talk us through the progress over the last year. Yeah, I think it's been uh I mean all the above. Like we've been talking to these guys for for a while. Um

they've been fans of the product. I think as all of our investors have, they've all like used the product a bunch um before we've got to talking about investing and then um uh yeah like like growth has been good and continuing and like uh I think it's the combination of that and then like the I feel like the the environment is like waking up like to the power of of um of having all of the context of what's happening in your meetings in in a company, you know, like uh I think

like everybody adopting MCP is making it apparent that you can like if you have the right context about what's happening in the company, you can do that to power so much of what's happening in your company.

Um, and I think we're just well positioned as like that that context gatherer that a company can take advantage of.

Yeah. So, my my uh something I've been thinking about with this category is why do you think the why do you think the labs have not built a product in this space? Sure, there's a number of reasons, but uh I'm sure they would generally love the context that you're gathering so that their agents could actually uh leverage it uh directly and uh and and so and so explain like why you guys have had kind of just a open uh open not not to say open but there's certainly competitors but like why have you guys been able to just market

image? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm sure they I'm sure they are working on it. Like, uh, OpenAI had a stab at it last year. They had like a um launched like a longer running record mode thing, which I think was aimed at this, but like I think I think it's a few things like I think um we we're basically like people use for meetings, right? which is like um it's a big term for a for a startup like us, but it's also like only a slice of people's life like in uh and if you're designing like a super open-ended general purpose chatbot like JBT, I think like they're probably questioning like does this make sense or should we be going for like always on recording of everything and and anything less is is like not good enough. Um

I think that's probably part of it. The other the other thing is like um uh I mean we found building granola that that like you can build a granola clone like super easily, you know, right? In like a weekend you could build a thing that transcribes your meetings and gets you a summary

and like all the work is in um understanding like the all of the like social nuance of like who are these people in the meeting, why are they meeting, what's this meeting about, and like therefore like what notes do you want out of it? What are the action items you should care about? like um just just kind of all the work behind the scenes to like actually make this thing fit into your life in a way the way you'll use it and find the notes useful is uh is a bunch of work and yeah that's um you know we use the latest and greatest model so like you've still got to go and do that work on top of that at least today.

Yeah. Uh yeah makes total sense. What what kind of progress are you guys make? Like what is the what's the most kind of like sci-fi element of of the pitch for this last round? Like are you imagining a future where the only thing that humans do is just kind of meet and talk about what should be done and then make a decision and then machines ultimately carry out all the work. uh like like h how how far are you kind of like taking out the uh how far out are you kind of looking? I mean I can see I can see that like yeah I can see that someone being true like I do think like um I mean we do it we do it internally in the company you know we'll we'll meet and talk about a thing and then and then go ask Granola to write a brief uh that we either go then hand to a coding agent or um or we use it as the material to write a job description or a blog post or whatever like the conversations are like incredibly good input for a lot of the work that you end up needing to do at a company. Yeah.

Um I think the like the more kind of like the most near-term but sci-fi things that that we we see is like um if you want like a pulse on what's happening with like any project or any group of people in the company um going and like looking and asking Granola what's what's happening with with this with this project um is like easy and incredibly like insightful. Um, and I think that's that's essentially because like transcripts are just such a good up-to-date record of like what's happening in a company. Um, so much more so than like a I don't know a notion doc or a Google doc that someone had to sit down and write like you know without making any effort you have kind of an up-to-date picture of what's happening in the company and um that's I think that's just going to useful to a lot of people in in so many ways.

What is uh what does diffusion look like inside a large company? like how much training, education, messaging you have to do? I'm sure you have playbooks for this, but how do you uh because once you like land I imagine the next step is expand. What does that look like for Granola?

All word of mouth pretty much at the moment like for most companies like um we we focus so much on just making it like a good product for the individual. um when we started that yeah like like still the majority of our growth is like patient zero finds it at a company and then tells their friends about it cuz they cuz they love it so much and and we just go on from there. Um we I mean we're working on a bunch of team facing features that kind of let you harness the value of a whole group of people using it together. And I mean the motivation behind a lot of that is that we kind of create a reason for you to just go wallto-wall uh across your company with Granola and kind of unlock the power of of sharing all that context of the transcripts together. Um but for the most part it's still just word of mouth. People people love it and they share share that with each other.

Talk about the end ofear wrapped campaign. Uh I've heard fantastic reviews for it. That was such a that was such a delight to to like explain it for those who who did not receive one or followed the story and then tell me about

Yeah. So so we did a like our spin on you know Spotify wrapped as as many companies do. Um which for us was Granola Crunched. Um the basic thesis was like you know Granola if if you've used Granola some some of our users have used Granola for like thousands of meetings over the last year. And um and if you look in inside those meetings and across over a year, you can you can tell a lot about a person and what's going on and what's important in their lives. Um so Granola Crunch was basically like every user could could go hit a button and generate a like Spotify rap style report about them about their year. Um it was things like like uh who's your partner in crime? What's your favorite catchphrase? um what's like what are what are the some of the smartest things you said what are some of the dumbest things you said that you know that kind of thing and uh it was like you know mostly fun there there's some there's some things that could hit pretty hard like like uh I remember mine was like kind I felt kind of uneasy sharing it with other people cuz it felt

I've heard that from a number of people they've been like it was scarily accurate and I didn't want to share with the rest of my team

you said nothing from my end thanks over 2,000 times.

That's great.

Okay, so we we have this buddy who's who's, you know, built a massive company in a super regulated industry and like had been through ultimately had a had a huge exit, but has been

uh been through kind of dis, you know, lawsuits and discovery along the way. And so he's just like absolutely hates every product in this category. He's like, I don't care how useful it is. It's not worth, you know, someday having like, you know, basically line by line live kind of transcript of uh every meeting that you've had at a company. What what are the I'm sure you guys are aware of of, you know, some of these more like sensitive

uh use cases like what kind of fixes like what what are you doing at the product level for people that don't want every conversation?

We sell saunas. So, if you want to have a meeting that's off the record, you go into your company sauna and then nothing can record you. There's no recording devices. This is the This is Lindy. You go to the bath house.

Maybe check check for any product rolls.

You got a wire on you. You take off.

Anyway, Sam.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like this is like a really tricky path for us to walk and like it's it's like so important for us to be, you know, doing what we think is right at every step of the way. Like I think um I think we have to juggle like I think tools like this are kind of they're they will be somewhat inevitable in a in a work context. I think I think like talking about the personal you know like always on recording type things is totally different but in a work context there's just so much value in having like you know like transcribes meetings and therefore being able to use that conversation data for stuff. So I think that's kind of inevitable. The question is like how do we how do we kind of make that okay for for people? um in the meantime and I think like some things we've observed are like uh for companies that use granola um they very like they basically just get comfortable with the idea that like we're going to make it a thing that like we use granola internally and um and that's the default like that should you should kind of just assume that's happening um and you know you can like it's okay to opt out and say you don't want to you don't want to use it

um

but uh companies get comfortable with that very easily we Um then then like the the external question is like a question of following the laws in your state and and you know like granola

we we make that clear to you but it's ultimately it's a tool and and you kind of it's up to you to follow the rules on it. But I but I meant more like even on like data data retention, right? So so like like if a company there there are plenty of meetings that are just

not that important, but if that was pulled in discovery at some point down the road, it could be unnecessarily damaging. Now, the bull case for this is that whoever's, you know, suing the company and like wants that discovery actually has more like they're they're more able to make a an effective case.

Um,

yeah,

but uh but but like yeah, I was asking more referral link for companies that I'm planning to sue. We uh we had like we had this from companies in all all directions like uh

some companies are like real like this is an opportunity for them to have things on record and so they

Yeah. Yeah.

them. Yeah.

But plenty go the other way, right? Where they they want everything like off the record and deleted immediately. Um

we've ended up building a bunch of uh retention controls so you can do this either way. Like some companies will

set transcripts to self-destruct after 24 hours. Um, so like you know there's no more record of those and you just get left with the notes. Um,

and uh, yeah, I think I'm I'm a big fan of that. Like I feel like

we there it's not in our interest to have like a like a real like on the record recordings of everything that's happened. Like all granola needs is

is the the kind of main notes of what was talked about.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Makes sense.

Like a healthy level of abstraction is like good for everybody there. I think.

Last question. Can you uh tell me about the brand because this could have been called like Panopticon. It could have been black background, steel, silver. You know, it it could have been very different branding wise, but it's granola. It's crunchy. There's a you know, this this like green color that you've picked. Like it's clearly intentional. What are you What are you thinking with the brand? Yeah, we basically like I think since the beginning when we first started studying how people take notes, I think one thing that was really apparent was like taking notes in meetings is a really personal thing. And uh we like there was already a bunch of AI noteakers out there, but people hated them. People nobody wanted to use it and no one felt comfortable kind of like writing their raw messy thoughts into them. Um, and so we really just wanted Granola always to feel personal and like it's yours and that the more you use it, the more it feels like your space

and uh all the all the branding is like downstream of that like the name, the the colors, the kind of messy like organic feeling textures and stuff like

it's all meant to communicate that this is like your your thing. This is not this is not your company's thing. This is your thing.

Love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on during a big day and breaking it down for us. Uh, very exciting