For a full year, Chris Pedregal sat next to strangers and watched them install his software.
There were 150 of them. He would sit beside each user while they set up Granola, note where they hesitated, go home, fix the problem, and come back the next day to watch another one try. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast that this was how he found out what was wrong.
Granola listens from the user's own device, so no bot appears in the meeting.
Pedregal had done the founder thing before. He built Socratic, an education app that Google acquired in 2018, and stayed on inside Google. By the time he started Granola with Sam Stephenson in 2023, he knew what it was like to ship a product with enormous reach. He also knew what a crowded field looked like, because the meeting-notes market was already full of bots that joined calls and unsettled the people on them.
His choice was to build something quieter. Granola listens from the user's own device, so no bot appears in the meeting. It lets you type rough notes and then merges them with an AI-cleaned transcript. He later told Bloomberg the market is commoditised and oversaturated, and that he would never have entered it if the goal were just to generate meeting notes.
The patience is the unusual part. Pedregal delayed the public launch until the product was, in his words, 'meaningfully better than the competition.' When it opened, it drew 500 installs on the first day with no advertising. Enterprise customers followed the organic growth.
The money came fast once it did. The Series B in May 2025 raised $43 million at a $250 million valuation. In March 2026 a Series C of $125 million, led by Index Ventures with Kleiner Perkins, set the valuation at $1.5 billion, roughly six times what it was ten months earlier. Pedregal said revenue had grown 2.5 times since January, though he did not give a dollar figure.
The risk is plain: giants like Zoom and Google can bundle note-taking into the tools people already use. Granola's answer is to turn notes into a base for agent-style features that act on what was said in the meeting.
What Pedregal's year of watching suggests is simple. Behind a billion-dollar price tag is a founder who was willing to sit in a stranger's chair and be confronted, a hundred and fifty times, with the fact that his product still wasn't good enough.