170% Net Dollar Retention. In this AI market, that number shouldn’t exist..even the best of AI companies are struggling with massive churn..
My AI meeting notes app (Granola) sent me a “Year in Review.” I was surprised, it was able to dig into my notes and get that number out. It also went a step further and, revealed the reality of how we actually hit that number.
Most Vertical AI startups are building “wrappers.” We spent 2025 building a fortress.
Here is the autopsy of a 170% NDR year – The Granola Version:
1. The “Hallucination” Factor (The Infrastructure) While competitors were shipping flashy chatbots, my co-founder Nagendra Kumar, and the engineering team was obsessed with latency and “hallucination-free” architectures. We didn’t win contracts because our AI was “smart” or mimicked humans better than human agents, We won because when a luxury brand asked, “Will this invent fake products?”, we could prove that it wouldn’t.
2. The “Spaghetti” Reality (The Integration) Enterprise stacks are nightmares. Magento V1 mixed with Netsuite and ancient custom APIs. The review highlighted how often we took a client’s “technical debt” and reframed it as a clean architecture. We didn’t just sell software; we acted as the janitor for their data. That is why they don’t churn.
3. Winning Premium Logos (The Output): Ours isn’t a standard POC. High-end brands don’t care about your algorithm’s parameter count. They care about the vibe. We win them because the product and onboarding feels like a white-glove personal shopper, not an IT ticket.