Grain has raised a $16M Series A

Today, I'm thrilled to announce we've raised $16M in Series A funding, led by John Curtius from Tiger Global, with participation from Zoom Apps Fund, Unusual Ventures, and Freestyle VC with the continued support from Slack Fund, Acrew, Peterson Ventures and other great institutional partners.

My brother Jake and I started Grain in 2018 with a shared belief that the way we communicate in the workplace had to change. It was too common for important information to get lost in a sea of email, instant messages and lengthy meetings. We saw that remote and hybrid work were on the rise, that video meetings were quickly becoming the backbone of how companies got things done, and we bet the transition from in-person to online meetings would only compound the frustration of lost information. After three years and one global pandemic, it turned out we were on to something: Gartner now predicts that 75% of all video meetings will be recorded and analyzed by 2025.

For most teams today, Zoom fatigue has morphed into Zoom amnesia. What’s said in a meeting is rarely retained by attendees or shared with team members beyond the call. Remote and hybrid teams feel disconnected and out of the loop. Is somebody taking notes? Who remembered to hit record? Can you please share the hour-long recording with me that I probably won’t have time to watch?

We founded Grain for teams who spend countless hours in video meetings and need to make the most of every conversation. A video meeting workspace to capture, share, and index the most important moments. Gratefully, I’m proud to say we’ve found customers and partners with the same vision.

Product teams use Grain to capture the voice of the customer, sales teams understand their sales cycle better, recruiting teams hire better candidates, and distributed teams align around their organization’s vision. It’s been incredible to see teams bring company, customer, and market knowledge to life by clipping, highlighting, and sharing moments from a library of video assets. But we’re just getting started.

We’re also excited to announce the acquisition of PingPong, a video messaging platform backed by YC, TechStars and MatchStick ventures. PingPong CEO Jeff Whitlock and team have joined Grain to accelerate product development for our customers and support our go-to-market efforts.

As part of this round we’re overjoyed to welcome operating leaders as investors: Sahil Lavingia (Founder, Gumroad), Kat Kennedy (President, Degreed), Kyle Parrish (VP Sales, Figma), Hiten Shah (CEO, Nira), Nakul Patel (VP Sales, mmhmm), Austen Allred (CEO, Bloom), and Conor White-Sullivan (CEO, RoamResearch), among others.

Armed with a talented team and resources, we’re going to continue investing in customer-first products and culture-first teams. I welcome you to join us.

With gratitude,

Mike