Is This Simple Note-Taking App the Future of AI?

In 2025 there were several AI tools launched and most apps try to replace human tasks entirely. But Granola in this case performed the best option and took a different approach—and Silicon Valley noticed big time. This simple AI note-taking app has raised over $60 million in funding and caught the attention of major tech companies, proving that sometimes the best AI doesn’t replace humans but makes them better.

The Problem That Started It All

Anyone who’s ever sat through back-to-back meetings knows the struggle. You’re trying to pay attention, participate meaningfully, and capture important details all at once. Traditional note-taking apps make you choose between being present or being thorough. Voice recorders create hours of audio nobody wants to review. Meeting bots feel awkward and impersonal.

Granola saw this gap and decided to build “the only one putting the human first.” Instead of trying to replace human note-takers, they created an AI-powered notepad that works alongside your natural note-taking habits.

How Granola Actually Works

The concept is beautifully simple. Granola works by installing locally on your Mac and connecting to your calendar. It captures audio from popular meeting platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams without requiring any meeting bots to join. You jot down the things that matter to you during the meeting, just like you would with a regular notepad.

The magic happens afterward. Granola uses AI to transcribe the entire meeting in the background, then combines your handwritten notes with the full transcript to create comprehensive, useful notes. No awkward meeting bots – just beautiful notes for you and your team, every single time.

Why Silicon Valley Went Crazy for It

The milestone showcased an incredible story. In October 2024, Granola raised a $20 million Series A funding round despite just 5,000 weekly users. That number has grown consistently by 10% each week since, reaching around 50,000 users by early 2025. Then in May 2025, AI-powered notetaking app Granola is raising $43 million in funding at a $250 million valuation.

But it’s not just about the money. Since launch, Granola has quickly gained traction among senior tech leaders at companies like Vercel, Ramp, and Roblox and top venture capital firms including Benchmark, Sequoia, Accel. These aren’t just any users—they’re the people who see hundreds of AI tools every week and choose what’s worth their time.

The Human-First Philosophy That Won

What makes Granola different isn’t just its technology—it’s its philosophy. They advocate a message that resonated across Silicon Valley: AI should support human thought, not replace it. In a world where AI companies rush to automate everything, Granola’s approach feels refreshingly human.

The app doesn’t try to think for you or make decisions about what’s important. Instead, it amplifies your own judgment and note-taking style. You decide what to write down in the moment, and AI fills in the gaps later. This approach respects both human intelligence and the irreplaceable value of being present in conversations.

AI Tools

Granola’s success represents something bigger than just good note-taking software. It shows that the most successful AI tools might not be the ones that replace human tasks entirely, but the ones that make human capabilities stronger. We worry a lot about AI replacing humans, sometimes AI tools can just make better humans.

The app also proves that simple concepts, executed well, can beat complex solutions. While other companies built elaborate AI meeting assistants with dozens of features, Granola focused on doing one thing exceptionally well—making meeting notes better without changing how people naturally work.

As remote work continues and meetings multiply, tools like Granola become more essential. The company’s rapid growth and high-profile funding rounds suggest that Silicon Valley believes AI-assisted note-taking is just the beginning of a larger trend toward human-AI collaboration.

For professionals drowning in meetings, Granola offers hope that AI can actually make work more human, not less. By handling the tedious parts of note-taking while preserving the human elements of attention and judgment, it might just represent the future of how we’ll work alongside artificial intelligence.

The lesson for other AI companies is clear: sometimes the best way to grab Silicon Valley’s attention isn’t to replace what humans do, but to make them better at it.