Granola

Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson started Granola in 2023, initially focusing on meetings and preserving useful context while participants remained engaged. Stephenson leads design.⁠[1]

Co-founder Chris Pedregal serves as the company’s CEO.⁠[2]

After a closed beta, Granola launched publicly in May 2024. On October 23 it announced a $20 million Series A led by Spark CapitalSpark CapitalSpark Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in Boston in 2005, with offices in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Its early-stage and growth funds back technology businesses across fintech, enterprise software, AI and consumer products. Investments have included Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus, Plaid and Anthropic.Open the full entry, with AI Grant, LightspeedLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry and others participating. Its workflow combines users’ typed highlights with background transcription and AI enhancement.⁠[3]

Tenable reported that a Granola configuration endpoint exposed a transcription-provider key capable of accessing transcripts. Granola confirmed remediation on March 11 by revoking the key and removing its exposure. Tenable later clarified that the affected data came from the iOS testing program.⁠[4]

The company’s May 16 post-mortem identified 333 TestFlight testers and said its production macOS app was unaffected. It reported finding no unauthorized access beyond Tenable’s controlled testing, acknowledged missing initial outreach and described changes to vulnerability handling.⁠[5]

Granola 2.0 added shared folders, cross-meeting chat and citations linking back to transcripts for workflows such as sales, hiring and research. A concurrent $43 million Series B was led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross at NFDG, with Lightspeed and Spark returning.⁠[6]

Granola reported that 187 users with disconnected, suspended or deleted Google Workspace accounts could retain access to historical notes through existing sessions. Desktop and iOS fixes shipped May 28, followed by a web fix June 2 and logout of affected sessions.⁠[7]

A separate flaw could let legacy unmanaged GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry accounts automatically join workspaces based only on an email-domain match. Granola added Workspace membership verification on May 23 and reported finding no unauthorized access through unmanaged accounts.⁠[8]

The redesigned Granola Chat introduced Recipes: saved prompts combined with meeting context. Users can invoke them with a slash, create their own and keep them private or share them, supporting preparation, product requirements, design feedback and sales analysis.⁠[9]

Granola announced a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures with Kleiner Perkins and existing investors. Spaces separated team-shared content from personal notes, adding nested folders and contextual chat alongside expanded enterprise controls and interfaces.⁠[10]

The founders explained that Granola uses system audio and the microphone rather than joining calls as a bot, making its presence less automatically visible. Configurable chat notices, video watermarks and transcription reminders support participant awareness; enterprise controls also govern retention and administration.⁠[11]

Granola announced voice typing for entering dictated text into other apps, offering unlimited words free to its users.⁠[12]

The feature formats punctuation and paragraphs and uses names and vocabulary from meetings. At launch it was available on Mac, with Windows, iOS and Android planned. It writes users’ own messages and documents, distinct from capturing multi-person meetings.⁠[13]

Dictation history is local. Failed audio may be encrypted and retained for 24 hours for retry, with storage controls available. Processing still sends audio and related data to providers. Optional screen context reads nearby text through Accessibility rather than screenshots; dictation works when it is disabled.⁠[14]

Granola says desktop transcription is real-time, while mobile may temporarily cache audio; meeting recordings are not retained afterward. Notes and transcripts reside in encrypted US-hosted AWS infrastructure, private by default and shareable or deletable by users. External transcription and AI providers mean processing is not purely offline.⁠[15]

Granola says it may use anonymized data to improve its services by default, with individual opt-out settings. Enterprise workspaces are opted out by default and offer organization-wide controls. Provider agreements prohibit third-party model training on user data; bringing users’ own models is currently unsupported.⁠[16]

Business and Enterprise plans provide API access to notes, transcripts and summaries with personal and workspace-public scopes. Admin-managed workspace keys are independent of individual accounts and cover public content and explicitly API-enabled spaces, without unrestricted access to unshared private notes.⁠[17]

Granola MCP supports meeting search, topic queries, action-item extraction and authorized note retrieval. It connects through user OAuth or compatible enterprise-managed authorization, respects the active workspace and does not automatically merge multiple workspaces. Enterprise administrators can restrict available scopes.⁠[18]

As of October 2026, listed plans were free Basic, Business at $14 per user monthly and Enterprise at $35. Basic exposes 30 days of history; Business adds full history, advanced integrations and APIs, while Enterprise adds SSO, organization controls, access management and centralized automatic deletion.⁠[19]