Chris Pedregal

Chris Pedregal co-founded Granola with designer Sam Stephenson in London in 2023 and is its chief executive. The product listens to a user’s meetings without sending a bot into the call, then turns the transcript and the user’s own jottings into structured notes.

Pedregal joined Google as an associate product manager in 2008. He later founded Socratic, a homework-help app that Google acquired in 2018, and left Google in 2022 to experiment with OpenAI’s large language models before starting Granola, according to Platformer.

From personal tool to company product

On 25 March 2026 Granola raised a $125m (£93m) Series C at a $1.5bn (£1.1bn) valuation, led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins with Lightspeed, Spark and NFDG. TechCrunch reported that the valuation was six times the $250m set at its $43m Series B in May 2025, and that Granola has raised $192m in total.

The round came with a shift in what Granola sells. Spaces gives teams shared folders with access controls, a personal API and an enterprise API let business customers pull meeting context into other tools, and its Model Context Protocol server feeds notes to assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT. Named business users include Vanta, Gusto, Asana, Cursor, Lovable and Mistral AI.

“These companies are turning to Granola not only to capture their notes, but also to capture their context,” Pedregal said at the time of the round, as reported by BusinessCloud.

A line on workplace monitoring

Pedregal has also set limits on how that context can be used. In a July 2026 interview with Platformer, he explained why Granola does not offer employers a way to mine staff meeting notes to judge individual workers. “If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn’t feel right to me,” he told the newsletter.

Why it matters to UK buyers

Meeting transcripts are fast becoming a data source that other AI tools draw on. For UK IT and compliance leaders, that raises practical questions about where recordings sit, who can search them and whether they can be used in performance management. Granola’s answer, a shared workspace with admin controls and a stated refusal to act as a monitoring tool, gives buyers a clear position to test against their own policies. Resellers and consultancies building on AI assistants may find its APIs a route to adding meeting context to the workflows they already run.

In three years Pedregal has taken Granola from a personal note-taker to a $1.5bn business product, and has been explicit about the uses he will not sell it for. That combination is likely to matter to buyers as much as the notes themselves.