ENTERPRISE AI · PALO ALTO, CA · EST. 2019
Glean
Work AI that actually works.
The enterprise search company built by ex-Googlers who got tired of watching smart people waste hours looking for things at work - and decided to fix it.
Arvind Jain spent over a decade at Google - working on Search, Maps, and YouTube - and then co-founded Rubrik, a data security company that became a billion-dollar business in roughly a year. Rubrik was a success. It also ran on 300+ cloud applications.
When Jain asked his team at Rubrik what was making their work life harder, the answer was not performance reviews or too many meetings. The single biggest issue was: finding information. Slack had it. Confluence had it. Google Drive had it. Jira had it. Nobody could find any of it.
Jain knew this problem better than almost anyone alive. He had spent years building search for Google. He understood, at a deep technical level, exactly what enterprise search was getting wrong. So in January 2019, he pulled together three colleagues - all of whom had also worked at Google - and started Glean to fix it.
"Finding information was identified as the single biggest employee environment issue."
- Rubrik Internal Survey, cited by Arvind Jain as the spark for GleanThe company stayed in stealth for over two years, quietly building. When Glean finally emerged publicly in September 2021, it had already done the hard work: built a search engine that understood permissions, context, and meaning across all the apps a company uses. Not a glorified keyword matcher. An actual semantic, deep-learning-powered engine that knew what you were looking for even when your search terms were vague.
What followed is one of the sharper growth stories in enterprise software. From $15M raised at inception to a $7.2B valuation by mid-2025. From a single product to a full Work AI platform covering search, an AI assistant, and autonomous agents. From an idea born out of frustration at one company to a system deployed at 400+ enterprises across 27 countries.
Glean started as enterprise search and grew into something more like a platform for how work gets done. The product suite now has three distinct pieces that layer on top of each other.
Connects to 100+ tools - Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, Google Drive, Confluence, ServiceNow, and on - and makes everything searchable in one place. Permission-aware, so you only see what you're supposed to see. Indexes 27 billion documents across an organization's digital workspace in real time.
Third-generation AI assistant launched in September 2025. Built on both an Enterprise Graph (understanding the company's people, content, products) and a Personal Graph (your goals, writing style, preferences). Can write, analyze data, orchestrate tools, and complete multi-step tasks.
A platform for building and running AI agents without writing much code. Employees can deploy agents using natural language. Runtime governance keeps everything compliant. Already processing over 100 million agent actions annually, with a target of one billion by year-end 2025.
The security wrapper around all of it. Single-tenant cloud deployments, strict permission enforcement at every layer, sensitive content safeguards, runtime agent validation. For regulated industries, there's also an on-premises deployment option built with Dell Technologies.
That 40% daily-to-monthly active user ratio is worth pausing on. The industry benchmark for SaaS tools is around 18%. Glean's is 40% - meaning employees are not just trialing it. They're using it every workday.
The valuation tripled in 16 months - from $2.2B in February 2024 to $7.2B by June 2025. Over that same stretch, the company raised $610M and doubled its ARR. The investor list reads like a who's-who of enterprise tech: Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Altimeter, DST, ICONIQ, Coatue. Wellington leading the Series F brought a more traditional institutional voice into the mix.
Glean crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue in February 2025 - less than three years after commercial launch. For context, that pace puts it among the faster enterprise software companies on record to reach that milestone. It then doubled to $200M+ by December 2025.
Nine months. Double the revenue. In the middle of an AI market where every company is claiming hockey-stick growth, Glean's numbers are independently verified and press-released.
The $1M+ contract segment nearly tripled year-over-year. These are not small pilot agreements. Enterprises are deploying Glean company-wide and writing large checks to do it. The number of companies doing a full company-wide rollout more than doubled year-over-year.
Glean's customer list covers a wide enough range that it's hard to call it niche. Financial services, retail, healthcare, higher education, government, technology - the platform serves across all of them. Notable names among the 400+ paid customers include:
Users at these companies run roughly five searches per day through Glean. The company claims each employee saves around eight hours per year from faster information retrieval, with four of those hours coming during onboarding alone. For a 5,000-person company, that starts to add up to a real number.
All four co-founders worked at Google before Glean. That's not a recruiting coincidence - it's the whole premise. They spent years inside one of the world's most sophisticated search organizations, then left to apply those techniques to the enterprise. The founder list:
Distinguished Engineer at Google for 10+ years, working on Search, Maps, and YouTube. Co-founded Rubrik in 2014 (now publicly traded). Born in Jaipur, India; studied CS at IIT Delhi, then M.S. at University of Washington. The internal Rubrik survey that sparked Glean was essentially his own problem.
Nearly a decade at Facebook on developer platform, News Feed, and Ads, before that at Microsoft on developer tools and runtimes. Leads the technical integration work - the 100+ connectors that make Glean useful across any company's app stack. B.Tech from IIT Delhi; M.S. from UT Austin.
Spent 10 years at Google, where he modernized search result pages and led the Chrome Speed Team. Contributed to HTML5 standards and web performance work. 20+ years building products with fast user interfaces. The UI performance that makes Glean feel snappy is largely his domain.
Built Glean's core search product from 2019 to 2023. Previously at Google's core search ranking team from 2005 to 2017, then at Uber working on Transit and Shared Bikes. Left Glean around 2023 to found a new startup. His fingerprints are all over the search engine under the hood.
Glean's partner ecosystem expanded fast in 2025. The most notable moves:
On-premises deployment of Glean search and AI agents. Announced May 2025. Significant for regulated industries where cloud-only isn't an option.
Strategic partnership announced at Glean:GO 2025. Connects Glean's context layer to Snowflake's data platform.
Security partnership announced at Glean:GO 2025, reinforcing the enterprise security story around Glean Protect.
Strategic integration announced at Glean:GO 2025. Connects HR and workforce data into Glean's Enterprise Graph.
Featured at Glean's Work AI House at SXSW 2026, positioning Glean as a platform for enterprise AI transformation consulting.
Native integration that pulls meeting and communication context into Glean's search and assistant.
The idea came from a survey at Arvind Jain's previous company, Rubrik, where employees called "finding information" the single biggest problem at work. He literally surveyed his own company, saw the result, and went and built the fix.
Glean was founded in January 2019 but didn't emerge from stealth until September 2021 - over two years of building quietly before anyone knew the company existed.
Glean's wDAU/wMAU ratio is 40%, more than double the SaaS industry benchmark of 18%. Which means employees aren't just trialing it - they open it on most workdays.
All four co-founders worked at Google before Glean. The founding of the company was essentially a Google alumni reunion - with a shared grievance about enterprise software.
Glean hit $200M ARR faster than almost any pure-play enterprise software company on record. $100M in February 2025, doubled to $200M by December 2025. Nine months.
Glean:GO 2025, the company's first-ever user conference, drew 10,000+ attendees in-person and online. The next one - Glean:GO 2026 - is scheduled for August 26-27 at Fort Mason, San Francisco.