VCs’ lover Granola Is raising at $1B, while a 7-Person team Built a $10M+ARR AI Speaking Coach
AI as Infrastructure, Not Feature
AI Note-Taker Granola is about to be a $1B company
Last year, VCs’ favorite AI note-taker Granola raised a $43 million in Series B at a $250 million valuation, to build Team’s second brain.
Now, the AI note-taking startup is back in the market—reportedly raising at least $100 million led by Index Ventures, at a valuation approaching $1 billion.
Not bad for a product that, on the surface, “just takes notes.” But Granola isn’t really about notes.
It’s about replacing the cognitive infrastructure of modern knowledge work.
Spend time in VC offices or startup war rooms, and you’ll notice something is changing: fewer pens, fewer notebooks, even fewer open laptops during meetings. Investors increasingly rely on Granola to automatically capture fundraising discussions, company metrics, partner meetings—and generate structured, intelligent summaries.
In September, Granola shipped a call feature. Connect it once, and it effectively becomes your phone—recording, transcribing, and organizing conversations in real time. What began as a “second brain” for individuals quietly evolved into a second brain for teams.
When announcing a recent update, the founder shared something unexpected:
Frequent users begin to develop a real relationship with Granola.
Its core users—ambitious, opinionated, overbooked—live inside back-to-back meetings. In that chaos, Granola becomes grounded. Like a trusted notebook you carry everywhere. It supports you.
And the insight is simple but powerful: AI works best when it has deep context. The richest context in knowledge work isn’t your to-do list. It’s your conversations.
Meetings are where decisions happen, ideas are debated, and commitments are made. Even in an automated future, that won’t change.
Granola isn’t just building a tool that records meetings. It’s building AI that understands what’s happening—and helps move things forward.
The Fastest-Growing AI Category You’re Noticing Everywhere
“AI that takes notes for you” has quietly become one of the fastest-growing categories in AI.
Startups and enterprises alike are racing to leverage large language models for speech recognition and summarization. Otter became the first AI note-taking company to surpass $100M ARR.
And my last piece covered a solo founder who built $7M ARR AI note-taker in two years.
Granola’s early traction is no accident. It focused on a specific tribe from day one: the VC and startup ecosystem. It didn’t join meetings as an awkward “AI participant” like early competitors. Instead, it ran quietly in the background on your iPhone or Mac, transcribing calls without friction.
Distribution + positioning + product subtlety. That combination matters.
A 7-Person Team Built a $10M+ ARR AI Language Speaking Coach
On the language learning side, we’ve already seen explosive growth. Speak crossed $100M ARR. The AI Speaking App Fluently grew 100x ARR in a Year.
Now another company is emerging—this one with just 7 people.
