Granola’s AI note-taking app has become a viral hit in Silicon Valley since it launched in 2024. It automatically transcribes meetings and then turns them into useful summaries. Customers include several other hot AI companies, including Cursor, Lovable and Replit, as well as venture capital firms, such as Index Ventures, which led a $125mn financing in March that valued Granola at $1.5bn. The London-based company was co-founded by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson. Pedregal sold his previous start-up, the AI-powered education app Socratic, to Google in 2018.

Here, he talks to the FT’s global technology correspondent Tim Bradshaw about how AI is percolating through the workplace, what it’s like building on top of rapidly evolving models and the privacy implications of always-on AI listeners. Tim Bradshaw: Why do we need an AI note taker? Chris Pedregal: This is going to sound ridiculous but if you look at the history of humanity . . . essentially what humans have been capable of has been defined by the tools that we use. I’m talking about written language, mathematical notation and the printing press. And I know that’s a bit of a ridiculous start to this question, but I actually think a notepad is one of the best tools that we’ve come up with. It’s simple, it’s reliable, it’s open-ended. It’s a way for us to extend our memory and to organise our thoughts. The promise of an AI notepad is that it can write all the boring stuff for you, capture all the rote stuff or specific details that might be important when you go back and look at it, but still give you the space to lead the thinking, decide what’s important, have better ideas and better thoughts than you would without the tool.

TB: When you started using large language models for the first time, why was Granola what you decided to build? CP: I started playing with LLMs eight or nine months before Chat GPT launched [in 2022]. It was a beautiful time because it didn’t feel like everyone was sprinting, so I could actually take some time and play. In that time, before everyone was talking about them, it became really clear to Sam and me that all the tools we use for knowledge work were going to be reinvented on the back of these LLMs. As I started building these prototypes, it became very clear that tools having an understanding of who we are, our context and what we were trying to achieve, should just lead to way more helpful tools. Even today, [something like] Microsoft Word, it’s a completely generic experience. Two or three years from now, I think the idea that you and I are going to have the same experience [with] a piece of software — that software is not going to be personalised or the experience is not going to be bespoke to me — is going to seem weird. Our first pitch deck was for “the contextually aware workspace”. Then we were like, OK, where do we actually start? It turns out meetings are extremely rich in context, and people do a very bad job of capturing and making use of that context. We had different ideas that we put in front of people, but their eyes only lit up when they saw an early version of Granola. The vision was always much larger. It was like: how can we actually use your context to help you do work? Granola is only just starting to do that right now at the margins. It’s really mostly used as a context-capture and retrieval tool, less of an action tool. But that’s still the vision and still what we’re working towards. It just turns out capturing meeting notes is hard and really important to do well.

TB: How has the market for AI apps changed since you founded Granola in 2023? CP: In the early days, we had to handhold so much more to get decent quality out of the early models. The models do much better out of the box now. They can also handle much more context. Generally, the quality of the output you’re going to get is going to go up the more relevant context you give the model to do the task. I’d say over the past two years, a lot of companies, at least...