From Users to Believers: Our Investment in Granola

We frequently get the question - what AI tools have changed how we do our jobs the most as early-stage VCs? And consistently, it's evolved to be really only one answer: Granola.  We spend most of our days in conversations; it’s the atomic unit of venture. The raw outputs from our meetings – information and ideas - form the basis for the investment decisions we make. Granola captures these raw ingredients - extracts the essence, and as a small team of 8, allows us to collaborate and make sense of our daily workflow without missing much of a beat.

Granola launched a few months before Chemistry, and it very quickly became the most important product in our toolstack. It’s no small exaggeration to say that we built our investment process around Granola from the start, evolving our internal tooling as the product evolved and subsumed more than notetaking capabilities, quickly covering much of the knowledge management and CRM capabilities we needed. Granola product updates became appointment reading for us, after which we’d quickly and eagerly adapt our processes to best take advantage.

At a firm offsite in May 2025, we polled the entire team for the one company we wish we’d backed and the verdict was unanimous - Granola. So we took off our investor hats and put on our PM hats assembling our 19-point product feedback / feature request wishlist and shipped it over to Chris, Sam and team. And several months later, that email into the void led to an early investment and an even deeper appreciation for the Granola team’s maniacal attention to product perfection.

With Granola, it was not about imagining what the product could do. It was about experiencing the impact it had in our daily work. We saw just how quickly it became the default tool for Chemistry and the immediate impact it had on the core work we do as VCs. Meetings are often messy and the conversation does not flow in a straight line. Granola gets that – helping us capture what matters in the flow, and being there when we inevitably need to go back and dive deeper. Through a thousand and one little product touches, Granola has evolved to become even more core to our work, and we couldn’t be happier to celebrate today’s milestone - Granola’s $125M Series C led by Index and KP. But most importantly, we’re excited for the new features that lie ahead, and Granola becoming even more impactful to our daily workflow. We often joke that it is quickly becoming more knowledgeable than we are!