Glean Raises $260M to Build the "Google for Work" with Generative AI

In the fast-growing world of enterprise AI, Glean has just made a major statement. The five-year-old startup, which aims to become the “Google for Work,” announced a massive $260 million Series E funding round—doubling its valuation to a striking $4.6 billion in just six months.

Founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain, a former Google search engineer and co-founder of Rubrik, Glean was born out of frustration with the inability to efficiently find internal data in complex enterprise environments. Jain and his team experienced firsthand how productivity stalls when employees can’t access the knowledge buried across hundreds of different applications. Glean’s solution? A smart, AI-driven internal search engine that connects to over 100 workplace apps and delivers relevant, secure, and context-aware answers to employees.

Glean isn’t just another enterprise search tool. While many players like Elastic and Coveo target knowledge discovery, Glean is differentiating itself by training small language models per customer, ensuring deeper understanding of a company’s internal language and structure. The system tailors results based on user roles and previous interactions, offering results that are timely, reliable, and secure.

The company’s generative AI capabilities took a leap forward after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Recognizing the potential, Glean incorporated conversational AI into its product, creating an experience that not only retrieves data but can summarize, analyze, and automate tasks. Their new prompting features now help users complete multi-step workflows, and recent native integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud position the platform for even broader use cases.

The Series E round was co-led by Altimeter Capital and DST Global, with fresh participation from Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and continued support from a long list of marquee backers, including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The funding reflects not only investor confidence but a real shift in how enterprises view internal AI tooling.

According to Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter, Glean has hit a usage stride rarely seen in enterprise software. After speaking with more than 30 customers, Altimeter found that employees from departments as diverse as engineering, HR, finance, and support use Glean daily—often as frequently as email or calendar apps. In some companies, Glean has even become the default homepage for employees starting their workday.

With enterprise data only growing more fragmented and difficult to access, Glean’s mission is gaining momentum at just the right time. As businesses chase productivity through AI, the demand for smarter, more contextual internal tools is rising. And if Glean can continue on its current path, it may well become the central knowledge hub that modern organizations can’t live without.

Cited: https://fortune.com/2024/09/10/ai-startup-glean-valued-at-4-6-billion-in-260-million-venture-capital-round/