How Granola—and AI Note Taking—Grabbed Silicon Valley’s Attention
The note-taking apps have quickly changed privacy norms. No one’s unhappy about it.
At the moment, many in the tech industry have developed a rather profound addiction to Granola.
No, not to the crunchy breakfast-time oats—but to a software product made by a two-year-old startup that has come to dominate a crowded field of artificial intelligence–powered note-taking options. The tool from Granola, which was valued at nearly a half-billion dollars in May, has become something of an It App this summer among venture capitalists and startup founders.
For instance, Nikhil Basu Trivedi, a co-founder of Footwork, a San Francisco–based venture firm, no longer only fires up Granola in business settings: He’s also used it while meeting with his lawyer, his fellow board members of a nonprofit and his 3.5-year-old daughter’s preschool teacher, even though he pretty much knew what to expect from the latter. “Knock on wood—she’s doing pretty well,” he said. “A good kid.”
Meanwhile, Cat Noone, CEO of Stark, a Montreal-based software company, likes to turn on Granola while meeting with her therapist. Doing so allows her to stay more present in the conversation as it happens, she said, and she later reads the app’s auto-summaries to further reflect on what they discussed. “I don’t want to miss a thing,” she said.
Every few years, a new notes app becomes a darling of Silicon Valley, a place where digital optimization of body, mind and thought is a foremost obsession. Evernote was one, then Notion. More recently, the boom in AI has supercharged what note-taking software can do, making the apps infinitely more searchable, organizable and customizable than previous versions.
Nearly all the major meeting tools, like Google Meet and Zoom, offer an AI notes function, and older notes apps like Notion have also embraced AI. Still, Granola is the hands-down favorite among the tech elite, scooping up more than $70 million in funding from the industry’s top names, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nat Friedman, the investor who just became one of Meta Platforms’ AI czars.
Users prize Granola over other options for a number of reasons, including its sophisticated search function, which runs on natural language prompts—just as we might talk to ChatGPT or Claude.
More than anything else, though, people like Granola because it hides itself. After connecting Granola to an email calendar, users can join their meetings directly through Granola, and the app transcribes the conversation without ever visibly notifying the participants that it’s running. (The transcriptions happen live, and Granola doesn’t save the audio.)
The proliferation of Granola and of AI note taking has established a surreal status quo: A sizable portion of Silicon Valley’s population is recording each other all the time, often without telling the other person before doing so, upending privacy norms in a manner that would’ve been somewhat unimaginable even a few years ago.
No one seems too fussed about it. “Transparently, I kind of just assume that everyone is using a meeting note taker of some sort,” said Brett Goldstein, CEO and founder of Micro, a New York–based AI startup. And that’s apparently a universal assumption in the industry, judging by the more than half-dozen Granola devotees I spoke to.
As a result, no one expects to get a head’s up about someone using Granola to record a conversation, which makes people like Rebecca Kaden, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, outliers. She always makes sure to ask people if they’re comfortable with Granola before she turns it on. “I’ve never had anyone say no,” she said.
4 Tips for Using Granola and AI Notes
AI has made it possible to easily record and then closely study the content of everything from a dinner conversation to a doctor’s office visit.
- Download Granola’s mobile app and use it in settings like a dinner business meeting, where you’d like to take notes, but it would be awkward to keep scribbling them down.
- AI note-taking apps are also helpful in situations like doctor appointments, where notes are often essential, but the conversation is laden with dense information, which can be hard to write down quickly, Pedregal said.
- Such apps also come in handy if someone is attending a conference or seminar and wants to share the talk with people who couldn’t be there.
- Startups such as Windsurf, which makes a popular AI coding software, have used Granola not just for external meetings—say, recording notes of a sales call—but for internal ones, too.“I use it in every meeting with my boss now,” said Rudy Garza, a salesperson at Windsurf. “And she’s doing the same thing with all of us.”
Undoubtedly, part of what’s making everyone feel comfortable—at least for now—is that there hasn’t been a public horror story of anyone using Granola or another AI note taker in some devious fashion to embarrass someone or leak information, and none of the users I spoke to recounted such an incident or had even heard about one. And as with much of AI, the audio apps exist in a legal gray area, since laws about recording another person vary across the country.
“It’s a world where the norms are changing all the time,” said Sam Stephenson, seated next to his Granola co-founder, Chris Pedregal, in their East London office. “When we started, we were more on edge”—worrying whether Granola might run into privacy concerns—“and I think norms have already shifted to a lot of this kind of thing being normal.”
Stephenson and Pedregal met in 2023 shortly after Pedregal left Google. Pedregal had previously started an AI tutoring startup, Socratic, before selling it to Google, and he found himself itching to return to artificial intelligence after fooling around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model. He found Stephenson, a mobile app designer, in a thriving online group for people with a keen interest in “tools for thoughts”—note-taking apps, in other words.
For a year and a half, they labored to develop an app simple enough for users with “1% of their brain available for the tool at any given time,” Stephenson said. They launched the app in May 2024.
While Granola has a devoted coterie of loyal fans, it faces the stiff task of fending off much bigger rivals who might just copycat the startup to death. Brett Goldstein, founder of New York–based Micro, put a fine point on the problem: “Granola is more of a feature than a business product—like Snapchat stories.”
Pedregal doesn’t dismiss the size of the challenge ahead. “I don’t think the Granola product that we have today in two years would be a viable product: It needs to keep getting better—doing more and more for you. And we need to do that faster than anyone else,” he said. “That’s hard.”