Glean, a five year-old startup that says its goal is to build “Google for Work” using generative AI, has secured a fresh round of $260 million in venture capital funding. The deal values the company at $4.6 billion—double what it was worth just six months ago.
The company, which counts Reddit, Instacart, and Pinterest among its customers, also said its annual recurring revenue had more than tripled over the past year, although it did not provide a specific sales figure.
The new funding round—which marks Glean’s Series E, or its fifth major institutional funding round—was co-led by Altimeter Capital and DST Global, with participation from new investors Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and existing investors Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.
The company also announced a set of new prompting features to help automate complex, multi-step workflows, as well as native integrations for Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud.
Arvind Jain, Glean’s co-founder and CEO, spent over a decade at Google as a search engineer before leaving in 2014 to co-found Rubrik, a cloud security company that went public in April 2024.
Jain said that at Rubrik, he and his team grew frustrated at how difficult it was to find internal company data: “About four or five years into the company, we started to notice we were not moving as fast anymore,” he told Coins2Day in a recent interview. “It becomes very difficult for companies today to organize all of their internal company knowledge and data, across hundreds of different applications, to make it easily accessible.”
Inspired to solve the problem, Jain and three co-founders launched Glean in 2019 as a search system connected to all of a company’s internal data in over 100 apps. The debut of ChatGPT in late November 2022, however, made it obvious that an AI-powered chat-based search would add additional functionality to Glean’s product.
Of course, two years into the generative AI boom, nearly every AI startup targeting enterprise companies, including OpenAI, is focused on solving “knowledge discovery”—the process of digging into an organization’s data to give employees insights that can inform strategy, operations, and more. There are also other enterprise search-focused startups like Elastic and Coveo. But Jain said Glean, which uses most major models on its platform, goes beyond what a general purpose chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT offers. Instead, he says Glean can navigate complex connections among company data and also provides the security and governance features that enterprise companies require.
“One of the things that is still very challenging is that enterprise environments are actually very, very messy and complicated,” he said. “There is so much information that is spread across many different systems. Connecting and retrieving this knowledge with AI techniques, and the governance of all that knowledge, is still very difficult.”
Jain said Glean trains small-language models for each customer that allows the company to understand context specific to that customer and industry and respond to signals about what results would useful, current, and authoritative. Once a customer finds the right information, it can be summarized, analyzed, or automated into a multi-step task. “Lots of people build search into their apps, but if you’ve ever struggled to find an email message using terms you know are in the message, you know that not all search is equal,” he said.
Apoorv Agrawal, a partner at Altimeter Capital, said he first met Jain in 2017, but Glean’s performance over the past six months made the VC confident that the startup had several things that set it apart. “The first is the breadth of data knowledge sources and applications that Glean connects with, the second is its understanding of security and permissions,” he said. The third is that Glean can understand the unique context of each employee – for example, what the person’s role is and which documents they interact with most frequently.
But he added that Altimeter spoke to over 30 customers, who said a wide range of employees use Glean with usage frequency similar to email or calendar apps. “It’s not just sales folks or engineers, but also product managers, HR, finance, marketing and customer support,” he said.
Agrawal added that some companies said they even have Glean as their default home page: “You show up to work and you start your day on Glean,” he said.
Correction, Sept. 10, 2024: An earlier headline for this article misstated Glean’s valuation in its latest funding round. It is $4.6 billion.