About Granola
A fast-growing AI startup with big ambitions, Granola quadrupled its team in under a year
Granola is a London-based AI startup founded in 2023 that helps teams capture, summarize, and search meeting knowledge. In less than a year, the company has grown from 8 to over 30 people, scaling fast without losing cultural cohesion or operational clarity.
The challenge
Rapid growth split information between conversations and meetings
Granola’s explosive growth brought the usual scaling challenges: more meetings, more decisions, and more stakeholders to keep aligned. As the team quadrupled in size, they started to create key context across two fronts — in meetings and in day-to-day work.
Slack was already in place when Clementine Markman joined as Head of Ops. As activity increased, it became harder to keep things organized. “As the team grew, conversations multiplied,” said Markmans. “Slack gave us the flexibility to grow with it — we just needed simple guidelines to keep things structured and effective.”
Granola captures all the context in meetings, Slack captures everything outside meetings; we need both to work, and they’re perfectly complementary. Now with AI in Slack, the knowledge loop is complete.
How Granola works better with Slack
Slack keeps teams, partners, and knowledge connected in one place
As the team expanded, Markman put clear Slack conventions in place to make conversations more effective. “We created simple guidelines that we now include in onboarding,” she said. “It’s something we reiterate every few months.” From streamlining admin work to integrating tools and connecting directly with vendors and lawyers through Slack Connect, these practices ensure the platform scales with the company.
Slack channels
Slack channels are the backbone of Granola’s communication architecture. Team channels double as “ask” spaces for cross-functional collaboration, while project channels support time-limited work like #project-ios, which they used to launch the Granola iPhone app.
“If you want everyone to see something, you post in #team-granola,” Markman said. That convention keeps company-wide announcements in one place — from office policy changes to launch milestones — so people don’t have to chase context across DMs or in-person conversations.
Workflows
Automation further streamlines operations. Previously, visitor management relied on ad hoc messages and manual tracking, which often left gaps in security and coordination. A daily guest check-in workflow solves these security and coordination concerns. “Now we have visibility into every visitor: It keeps the office secure while still making guests feel welcome,” Markman said.
They also get a notification in Slack every time a customer upgrades from free-to-paid, making it easy to celebrate together and plan next steps.
Search
Slack’s search function has become one of the team’s most relied-on features. “You can go back and search for anything,” Markman said. Whether it’s revisiting a shared link, finding legal guidance from their fractional in-house counsels, or pulling up customer feedback, everything stays easy to locate, ensuring the team doesn’t lose context as it grows.
Integrations
For engineers, integrations transformed workflows. “The Cursor and Linear integrations in Slack are magical,” said Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business. Incident notifications, bug reports, and new subscriber alerts all flow into Slack, keeping critical issues visible and actionable.
Slack Connect
Engineers don’t live in email, which used to slow collaboration with vendors and lawyers outside Slack. Before bringing in-house counsel onto Slack, any legal question meant routing through Markman, who then had to email external lawyers. Now, legal, engineering, and external partners connect directly in Slack Connect channels, cutting out delays and keeping projects moving.
“With Slack Connect, partners feel like part of the team from day one,” said Markman. They can go straight to fractional in-house lawyers or vendors with questions, resolving issues in hours instead of days, a critical advantage in the fast-moving AI market.
For example, when usage overages spiked, the team connected instantly with Amplitude, their analytics partner. “With Slack, I got instantaneous responses while checking with our engineers in real time,” said Markman.
By consolidating workflows and external relationships in Slack, Granola eliminates delays, prevents information gaps, and protects its in-person office culture. “Even if the person is sitting next to you, sometimes I still Slack,” Markman said. “If they look focused, I don’t want to interrupt them.”
“Slack Connect is huge for us. Those touchpoints are much faster than email. Where possible, I’d always prefer Slack Connect over email. You can build a rapport much easier on Slack and come to a decision quickly.”
Next steps
Granola sees Slack as the foundation for smarter work, building Slack into its own app
As Granola continues to expand, Slack remains fundamental to operations. “Slack eliminates communication bottlenecks and keeps our team moving at speed,” said Shrestha.
To further reduce noise and increase efficiency, the company is exploring AI summaries and recaps. The goal is to make it easier for people to catch up on conversations they missed and ensure important context doesn’t slip through the cracks.
Granola is also building Slack deeper into its own app, enabling meeting insights to flow directly into Slack channels. “It made sense to build an integration,” Markman said. “People post Granola notes from standups into Slack. It’s where work happens.”
Looking forward, Granola sees Slack not just as a communication tool but as a platform for comprehensive company intelligence, connecting conversations, knowledge, and context in real time.
