Granola

AI Meeting Notes — Users Genuinely Love It

The consensus on Granola: Choose Granola if you want to ship a product users genuinely love on a tiny, in-person London team backed by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

2023

Founded

London

Headquarters

~50

Employees

$1.5B

Valuation (Mar 2026)

Culture Overview

What it's really like to work at Granola

Founded in 2023 by Sam Stephenson in London, Granola is the AI meeting notepad that sits on your device, transcribes meetings without a bot joining the call, and generates Notion-style notes afterward. The company reached a $1.5B valuation in March 2026 after a $125M Series C led by Index Ventures with participation from Kleiner Perkins. The culture is strong product-engineering on a small, in-person team — plenty of opportunities to work on things that move the product, with total ownership of your area.

Glassdoor Ratings

Granola Glassdoor Ratings & Employee Reviews

4.8

Overall Glassdoor Score

Based on 3 reviews (small sample)

Culture & Values 5.0

Work-Life Balance 4.5

Compensation & Benefits 3.8

Career Opportunities 4.5

Senior Management 4.7

Overall Rating 4.8

~100% Recommend to a Friend

Note: Glassdoor sample is small (3 reviews). Reviews synthesized with external press coverage from Bloomberg and BusinessWire.

Employee Review Themes

Working at Granola: Pros & Cons

✓ What employees love

✓ Users absolutely love the product — genuine product-market fit, not manufactured
✓ Small team means plenty of opportunities to work on things that move the needle
✓ Total ownership over your area — visionary founders, high trust
✓ Beautiful London office with breakfast, lunch and dinner provided

✗ What could be better

✗ 5 days in office by default (though flexible for life circumstances)
✗ London-based — limited remote-first role flexibility
✗ Developer pay concerns noted in Glassdoor — equity-heavy at this stage
✗ Very small team means less structured career ladders and process

Engineering Culture

How the engineering team works

Tech Stack

TypeScript Swift Python

Product

Native macOS app that transcribes meetings on-device without a bot joining the call, then generates Notion-style notes afterward. Launched Teams workspace in May 2025.

AI & ML

Leverages frontier LLMs plus an in-house transcription and summarization layer tuned for meeting context and privacy. Try Granola →

Team Structure

Small, in-person team in London. Total area ownership. Founder Sam Stephenson leads product and engineering direction, working closely with engineers on roadmap.

Community Sentiment

What the community says about Granola

Mostly Positive 5 mentions from Hacker News & Reddit · Updated 2026-04-17

“I've setup one on Hetzner. I got it a dedicated email account (via agentmail.to). Installed couple of skills, last30days and context-mode being the most useful so far (https://github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill and https://github.”

Hacker News piotraleksander · 2026-04-16 View thread →

“Hey HN; I’m the solo founder of Loreo. I built this because I wanted a meeting tool that actually acted like a ‘COO’ for my projects; not just a passive listener.Why I built this: I was frustrated with the current ‘bot-in-the-middle’ era of meeting apps.”

Hacker News fnel · 2026-04-13 View thread →

“This is cool! A couple of pieces of feedback as I am looking for something in this family of things but haven't found the perfect fit: 1. I have multiple inboxes, and want to have them work on multiple. 2.”

Hacker News mchusma · 2026-02-10 View thread →

“hey there, my name is jim. i am a 15 year old software developer. i have won an ai hackathon, worked as a swe at a us congress backed nonprofit, and i am part of a community of teenagers who build software and get funding for their projects.”

Hacker News jimmydin7 · 2026-01-10 View thread →

Sentiment data refreshed daily from public Hacker News and Reddit discussions. See all company profiles →