Turn a Human Service Into a $9M ARR AI in 8 Months
The $250M AI-powerd notepad
Three notable AI startups have recently caught my attention.
Gravitee ARR Hits $22M
Gravitee, an open-source API management platform founded in 2015, its platform offers comprehensive tools for designing, deploying, and managing both synchronous and asynchronous APIs, including RESTful and event-driven architectures like Kafka and MQTT.
Its features encompass API design, mock testing, deployment, and a unified dashboard for visualization. Notably, Gravitee provides federated API management, allowing governance across multiple API gateways and event brokers such as Amazon API Gateway and Google Apigee.
With a customer base exceeding 215 businesses across various industries and geographies, Gravitee has demonstrated robust growth. The company reported sales of £6.7 million in 2023, reflecting a three-year annual sales growth rate of 95.17%.
Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached $22 million in fiscal year 2024, and secured a $60 million Series C funding round led by Sixth Street Growth, bringing its total funding to over $125 million.
Granola is now worth $250M
Granola is an AI-powered meeting notepad which loved by many investors and CEO, it is now valued at $250M after raising a $43 million Series B led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross from NFDG.
Designed to enhance human input rather than replace it, Granola allows users to jot down key points during meetings while transcribing in the background. Post-meeting, the AI enriches these notes, creating a searchable and shareable archive. Key features include customizable templates, Slack integration, and AI-assisted chat for deeper insights or drafting follow-up emails. Unlike other AI note-taking tools, Granola operates directly on the user’s computer without adding bots to meetings, ensuring a seamless and unobtrusive experience.
Granola’s user base has seen significant growth, with over 57% of users in leadership roles across various industries. Notable users include leaders at unicorn companies like Vercel, Ramp, and Roblox, as well as partners at top VC firms such as Benchmark, Sequoia, Accel, and Union Square Ventures. Since its launch, the number of weekly users has grown sixfold, with many users averaging six meetings per week.
After as people’s “second brain”, it is now doing as a second brain for your team!
Turn a Human Service into a $9M ARR AI product in just 8 Months
Everyone’s talking about how AI is transforming the service industry — not just by making tools, but by replacing labor. But what does it look like when a traditional human-driven business fully reinvents itself with AI?
Before AI, it was a $5M ARR human service business with 80+ people, hard to scale because scaling meant hiring more people — and that meant lower margins, more complexity, and diminishing returns.
After reinventing itself with AI, it is now an AI product that made $9M ARR in 8 months and is estimated to reach $30M ARR by the end of this year.