6 Best Meeting Notetaker Tools for VCs in 2025

Venture capital is a fast-moving game. You're juggling back-to-back pitches, internal partner syncs, LP updates, and portfolio reviews. A lot of decisions get made in meetings, and context disappears fast if it's not written down. That's where meeting notetaker tools come in.

But most of the "top AI meeting tools" lists out there are written for general business users. As a VC, your needs are different. You care about speed, context, and confidentiality. You want to scan deal notes before a call, search for an old founder quote, or share a summary with a partner—without digging through hours of audio or Google Docs.

On top of that, you're often multitasking during meetings. You don't always have time to type detailed notes, and even if you do, it's easy to miss something. Many top VCs we know have already adopted AI tools to take this burden off their plate. If you're not yet using one, you might have plenty of room to improve your productivity.

What Makes a Note-Taker "VC-Ready"?

Not all AI tools are built for the pace and privacy needs of venture work. Here's what we looked for:

The 6 Best Tools

We tried a bunch of tools and picked 6 we think are most relevant for venture teams. We've grouped them into three categories:

1. Meeting Bots (Automated Joiners)

These "traditional" tools join your calls as a bot, record, transcribe, and summarize them automatically.

Fireflies

• Joins Zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams

• Offers transcription, speaker tracking, and automatic summaries

• CRM integrations for deal tracking

• Pricing: Free plan with limits; Pro plan at $18/month with 8000 minutes limit; Business plan at $29/mo with unlimited usage

Otter

• Transcribes live meetings and generates highlights

• Good for team collaboration with real-time annotations

• Speaker recognition and live captions

• Pricing: Free for basic use; Pro plan at $17/month with 1200 minutes limit; Business plan at $30/mo with 6000 minutes limit

These tools are good for: teams who want hands-off recording and summaries, and are okay with a bot joining every call.

2. Bot-Free Lightweight Tools

These don't join your meeting. Instead, they run locally or with minimal setup—ideal for VCs who want control and privacy. We've all been through that moment when a bot joins a private call, and everyone gets quiet or asks, "Wait, who's that?" It's awkward—and sometimes risky, depending on who's on the line.

That's why this new generation of notetaking tools, most of which have only appeared in the past one to two years, is so refreshing. They skip the bot altogether and focus on speed, simplicity, and discretion.

Granola

• Records audio from your device without joining as a bot

• Lets you take notes while the meeting runs—AI picks up key moments

• Generates summaries post-meeting, with rich templates to choose from or bring your own

• Simple and clean UI

• Pricing: Free trial plan; $18/month with unlimited usage

Cedar

• Mac app with a lightweight design, bot-free

• Lets you take notes while the meeting runs—AI picks up key moments

• Summary templates tailored for all kinds of investors (e.g., VCs, hedge funds, etc)

• Privacy mode: secret notes are stored locally and never leave your device

• Pricing: Free trial plan; $18/month with unlimited usage

Good for: VCs who value simplicity, speed, and privacy. Easy to try without onboarding the whole team.

3. Multi-Function Tools

These tools do more than meeting notes—but that can be a plus or a minus depending on your workflow.

Notion

• Offers a meeting recording feature

• Integrated with Notion Calendar and Notion Mail

• Rich language support

• Works best if you're already deep in the Notion ecosystem

• Pricing: Starts at $8/user/month for teams

ChatGPT

• Easy to start from a ChatGPT App

• It's ChatGPT, so asking follow-ups is a powerful feature

• But also messy—your meeting notes get mixed with other unrelated chats

• Pricing: $20/month for ChatGPT Plus

Good for: teams that want to customize every part of their workflow—or already live in Notion or ChatGPT.

Final Verdict

If you want a quick way to try AI notetaking without changing your workflow, Cedar and Granola are the easiest to start with. No bots, no setup headaches.

If you're ready to go all-in with automated bots and integrations, Fireflies and Otter offer more structure.

Already building your firm's knowledge base in Notion or a heavy user of the ChatGPT App? Then integrating meeting notes into those tools may be more natural.

Let us know what your team is using—we're always testing new workflows.