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Meet Glean, the enterprise AI search company that's so powerful Sam Altman deemed it a threat to OpenAI
- Glean, the AI search company that helps corporate workers find information across their companies' tools and data, raised over $260 million at a valuation of $4.6 billion. It integrates across multiple software apps and retrieves relevant answers. Glean enables AI search by integrating apps like, Slack and Dropbox and powers search across their company's universe of data.
- Founded in 2019 by Rubrik cofounder and ex-Googler Arvind Jain, Glean hit $50 million ARR over the summer and is projected to end this year with $100 million ARR, according to a source familiar with the company's financials. It is projected to hit $250 million by the end of next year, according to a source.
- Following OpenAI's latest $6.6 billion fundraise, CEO Sam Altman insisted investors avoid investing in five AI competitors, reported Reuters. Among them are Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and AI search startup Perplexity. The last of the five rivals, and perhaps the least well-known, is Glean, an enterprise search assistant.
- Jain previously founded Rubrik, a public cybersecurity company, and was an engineer at Google. Jain was one of Google's first distinguished engineers and reported directly to Google's founding CEO Larry Page. Although engineering was accidental, the desire to become an entrepreneur was deliberate.
- Glean helps businesses use AI by tackling a core function for employees—search. With so much data, it's difficult for employees to find what they're looking for. This can add up to over two hours a day, said Jain. Altimeter and DST Global co-led the latest round, which also included Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins.
- Glean's initial focus was search. Enterprise search is a "hard lift and a hard build," said Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid. "It's seemingly easy, but actually quite hard to build all the different connectors to different SaaS products and then build search itself."
- Glean's product, prevents users from accessing information that they're not meant to see, such as confidential financials or HR reports. Large language models (LLMs) helped boost Glean's capabilities even further. With LLMs, Glean can also generate answers in response to employee queries, including entirely new documents.
- "We had the opportunity to build Google for people in their work lives," and with that, Glean was born. "I have a very firm belief that companies win or lose because of themselves, not because of competition," said Jain.
- Jain grew up in Jaipur, an Indian city, and, excelled in math and physics. He moved to the US to earn a master's in computer science at the University of Washington. He joined Google in 2003 and worked on Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Search. Jain was far from the world of technology growing up, but his father owned "a bunch of small businesses…so he was also an entrepreneur in that sense," said Jain.
- "Even when you're playing table tennis, ping pong, or tennis, he will fight for that point," said Deedy Das, who led product development at Glean and now works at Menlo Ventures. "He doesn't care who you are. You could be a new grad; he doesn't care. He's going to fight for the point."
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