Introducing Granola: The AI Notepad That Enhances, Not Replaces, Your Thinking In Meetings

LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Granola has today launched the first AI-powered notepad for meetings designed to replace intrusive meetings bots, screen recorders and disorganized handwritten notes.

Granola’s tool works like a regular notepad on a computer – with the added benefit of transcribing meetings in the background.

At the end of each call, the app combines any user-written notes with the meeting transcription to generate a clear, beautiful overview of the meeting’s most important takeaways and next steps, tailored precisely to each user’s needs.

Granola achieves this through deep integration with your calendar. It analyzes each meeting participant’s role and objectives, recognizing each user’s unique priorities change from meeting to meeting – be it a job interview, sales call or investor pitch – and structuring their notes accordingly.

A COURSE CORRECTION FOR AI TOOLS

Co-Founder Chris Pedregal says:

“The problem with AI tools today is that they don’t take your judgment into account. Take AI meeting bots as an example. They’ll join a meeting and take notes, but you have zero control over what notes they write. You can’t tell the meeting bot what you think is important; the AI decides for you.

“We founded Granola to put people back in control of the AI tools that shape their working lives.

“Granola follows your lead because it isn’t a bot that joins your meeting, it’s a notepad. You take notes to tell Granola’s AI what’s important to you – think of it as leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Granola then follows your breadcrumbs and writes polished notes.”

GUIDED BY USERS, ENHANCED BY AI

Granola ensures you stay in control with a suite of intelligent features designed for clarity and precision.

In the output content, your own typed notes are displayed in black, while additional AI-generated content appears in gray, making it easy to distinguish between the two.

The “Zoom In” feature provides full transparency by allowing you to view the exact quotes your notes are based on, ensuring complete accuracy and trustworthiness.

Additionally, Granola integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4 to offer advanced context-aware assistance and task management to help with post-meeting action items like writing a follow-up email, recalling specific details, or creating a bug report.

NOTES THAT HELP YOU AND YOUR TEAM

Luke Shipley, Co-founder & CEO of Zinc, an automated reference and background checking toolkit, says:

“Adopting Granola has been great for Zinc. Our team shares more internally, and as CEO I feel much more in touch with the moves we’re making as a company.

“Granola is loved by account managers for client calls, managers for 1 on 1s, and recruiters for interviews. It’s become useful across the whole company and makes us collectively better.”

Granola is available to download and trial for free now: https://www.granola.so/

About Granola

Granola was founded in March 2023 by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson to change the way we work, with tools that understand us, anticipate our actions, and augment our abilities. In May 2023 they raised a $4.25m Seed round from Lightspeed Venture Partners, betaworks and FirstMinute. They are based in London.

Additional Links

Product Images: https://go.granola.so/launchassets
Launch Blog: https://granola.so/blog/announcement
Website: https://www.granola.so/
Twitter: https://x.com/meetgranola
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/meetgranola/

About the Founders

• Chris Pedregal – https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedregal/
  Chris studied Computer Science at Stanford before joining Google as a Product Manager, where he worked on Gmail, Search and Maps. In 2013 he quit to launch Socratic, an AI-powered tutor for high school students, which grew organically to 10+million MAUs and won “App of the Year” in 2017. In 2018, Socratic was acquired by Google, where it receives over four billion questions a year.
• Sam Stephenson – https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephensonsam/
  Sam studied graphic design at Falmouth before spending a few years in San Francisco at a design agency and an education non-profit. Along the way, he built his own startup connecting neighborhoods to local farmers, helped build an iOS app for Swim Smooth, designed interactive ski maps for Carv and helped an array of B2B companies with design and front end development.

Contacts

Name: Christopher Pedregal

Title: Co-Founder of Granola

Email: christopher@granola.so