Taking meeting notes is a chore, so why not leave that task to artificial intelligence? This is the principle behind a new startup, Granola, whose AI-powered notepad app lets you combine your own notes with AI-generated ones based on a transcript of your meeting. Unlike some other AI transcription apps that try to summarize the main points of a meeting on their own, Granola takes a more collaborative approach to working with AI. You can choose to guide the AI by noting what you think were the most important takeaways from the meeting and let the AI fill in the details.
Co-founder Chris Pedregal he says he was inspired to build Granola since we worked with GPT-3 when it was new. He experimented with different prototypes to understand how artificial intelligence could be useful in his daily life. The utility of AI was something that led him to create his previous company, Socratic, an AI teaching app that allowed people to take a picture of a problem at home and teach the user how to solve it. The company sold to Google and Pedregal remained the tech giant for a few years before starting to rebuild.
Building different tools, including an AI calendar app at one point, led to a realization.
“Through this process, I just became convinced that LLMs [large language models] It was going to change the tools we use for work. It’s especially powerful when it comes to spoken language and making it useful,” Pedregal said.
He later partnered with the co-founder Sam Stephenson, who previously worked on the note-taking app Ideaflow. The two first met through a meetup group focused on dating tools. Like Pedregal, Stephenson was also based in London, so the two ended up meeting in real life and found they hit it off. “Now, we’re basically married,” Stephenson joked.
The two founded Granola in March 2023 with the goal of making it easier to manage meeting notes.
“People are spending crazy amounts of time in meetings, especially after the pandemic — like Zoom meetings in particular,” Pedregal said. Many are in back-to-back meetings all day with no time to review, write or clean up their previous notes. Plus, for most people, meetings are the only time they take notes. they don’t often take notes in other parts of their lives.”
Granola is working to solve the note-taking problem with an app that’s essentially an AI-based evolution of something like Apple Notes. You interact with Granola on your computer and can choose to write your own notes or bullet points or leave everything to the AI. The app works by linking your calendar and then directly transcribes your Mac’s audio. This means that no meeting bots join your online meetings, as is the case with other solutions. Granola currently works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, and WebEx.
The app essentially works like a regular notepad, meaning you can type your own notes during the meeting. Granola, however, breaks down who is in the meeting, their roles, and what the meeting is about — like a sales call, a job interview, or an investor pitch, for example. When the meeting is over, Granola augments your notes with more information, linking to the transcript as it fleshes it out. If you make typos or forget to capitalize things, Granola will handle that during cleanup as well.
For example, if someone says during the meeting that the budget for a project is 10k, you can just write “10k” in your notes. When Granola returns, she will expand it to include more information, such as “Photo budget can reach 10K”.
Granola’s notes are linked to the transcript summary so you can check them for accuracy or simply quote what was said in full. AI notes are also written in gray to differentiate them from your own notes, in black.
The app uses Open-AI’s GPT-4o, which means you can also interact with it just like ChatGPT.
Pedregal believes Granola is an improvement over other meeting transcription tools because it doesn’t just summarize the meeting through AI: It lets you write your own notes and even collaborate with the AI. You can use Markdown formatting to guide the AI by typing in headings preceded by a pound sign, for example, and it will know to add bullet points that refer to that topic underneath.
“We currently outsource much of our thinking to LLMs, such as ChatGPt. And we have very little control over that,” Pedregal said. “You ask ChatGPT to write an email for you and it will write it and it’s magic. But then, if you manage to write an email that you would actually send… it is extremely difficult. It’s almost more trouble than it’s worth. I think that’s the big question right now: How do you design AI so that you’re still in control? Are you still using your judgment, but is it helping you do your best?”
Fueling Granola’s launch is a $4.25 million funding round that closed last year and was led by Speed of light. Other investors include; Betaworks, Capital of the first moment, Otherwise, Unusual and the angels like Mike Krieger, Soleil, Hunter Walk, David Lieb, Mike Haddock, Gabor Cselle and Andrew Parker.
Longer term, Pedregal says the team would like to expand beyond meetings to whatever next steps they might include, such as writing a memo, filing a bug report, planning a follow-up, and more.
Granola is free with us for the first 25 sessions, and then it’s a reasonable $10 per month. Over time, the startup aims to generate additional revenue by rolling out a team or company plan where pricing can be customized. The app is free for download on macOS.
