Granola
Meeting notes app that merges your typed notes with system audio, then exposes the result as a queryable store of company conversation context over API and MCP.
Overview
The mechanic is simple and it is why people switch. You type sparse notes during a call, the app listens to your machine's audio, and afterwards it merges the two into a structured summary shaped by your emphasis. Nothing joins the meeting. For anyone who takes notes anyway, the output reads like your own writing tidied up, which is a different experience from reading a generic recap of a transcript.
March 2026 changed what the company is selling. A $125M Series C at a $1.5B valuation, led by Index Ventures with Kleiner Perkins participating, funded a move upmarket: Spaces for team workspaces with access controls, a personal API on Business and an enterprise API above it. With MCP support, a year of meeting notes becomes queryable context for internal agents. Named customers now include Cursor, Vanta, Asana and Mistral AI. That enterprise story is more interesting than the notetaking, and it is also where the $35 per user price starts to need justifying.
Two things should slow down a technical lead. There is no Android client and no web app, which quietly leaves out part of most teams. And because system audio is captured with no bot to signal it, participants are recorded without the visual cue other tools provide, which is fine in single-party consent jurisdictions and a problem in places requiring all-party consent. Check the rule where your calls actually happen before rolling it out across a team.
Key Features
- ✓ Captures system audio locally instead of joining the call as a bot, so no extra participant appears in the meeting
- ✓ Merges your sparse typed notes with the transcript, so the summary follows your emphasis rather than the recording's
- ✓ API access and MCP support on the $14 Business tier, letting meeting history feed your own agents
- ✓ Spaces: team workspaces with folders and granular access control, shipped alongside the March 2026 funding round
- ✓ Chat across many meetings at once rather than only inside a single note
- ✓ Native Mac and Windows desktop apps plus iOS
Where it holds
- • Skipping the joining bot avoids the awkward moment where a recorder announces itself on a client or vendor call
- • API and MCP on the $14 tier is unusually open for this category, and it turns a year of meetings into something your internal agents can actually query
- • Notes reflect what you thought mattered, because they build on your typing instead of summarizing a transcript cold
Where it breaks
- • No Android client and no web app, so a mixed-device team ends up with uneven coverage
- • Recording system audio captures everyone on the call with no joining bot to signal it, which is a compliance question in all-party consent jurisdictions like California or Germany
- • The free tier's history cap makes it a trial in practice rather than a plan you can live on
- • $35 per user for SSO is a hard sell against Zoom and Teams, which now bundle their own AI recaps at no extra cost
My Take
The competition here is not other notetakers, it is the AI recap Zoom and Teams already ship for free. Granola wins on output quality because it builds on what you typed during the call rather than summarizing a transcript from scratch, and nothing joins the meeting as a visible bot. The March 2026 Series C, $125M at a $1.5B valuation led by Index Ventures, funded Spaces and an API on the $14 Business tier, and that API is the part an engineering lead should care about: meeting history becomes a source your own agents can query over MCP. Consent is the sticking point, since capturing system audio records everyone on the call whether or not anyone asked them.
Quick Info
- Pricing:
- freemium
- Openness:
- Proprietary
- Starting at:
- Basic free with limited meeting history. Business $14/user/month adds unlimited history, API access, MCP and integrations with Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity and Zapier. Enterprise $35/user/month adds SSO, admin controls, usage analytics and org-wide auto-deletion. Plans were restructured upmarket after the March 2026 Series C.
- Added:
- Aug 2026
- Updated:
- Aug 2026
Use Cases
Judge it on your own work
The notes above say where Granola holds and where it breaks. The fastest check is your own workload.
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