Artificial Intelligence · Profile from AI Research Companion
Glean
The Palo Alto enterprise-search company founded in 2019 by former Google search engineer and Rubrik co-founder Arvind Jain, which indexes a company's documents, messages and tickets across dozens of software suites and puts an AI assistant and, from 2025, AI agents on top. Glean's bet is neutrality: a large company that uses Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Atlassian, Slack and ServiceNow at once needs one layer that searches all of them with each user's permissions intact, and no single suite vendor will build that layer fairly. The bet paid off quickly once generative AI arrived: Glean reported $100m of annual recurring revenue (ARR) in its fiscal year to January 2025 (company, 5 February 2025), $200m in December 2025 (company) and ~$300m by late May 2026 (company, reported), and raised at $7.2bn in June 2025. The same years exposed its main weakness: the suites whose data Glean indexes are also its competitors, and in 2025 Salesforce restricted how third parties could store and index Slack data.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2019, Palo Alto, by Arvind Jain (CEO; ~a decade at Google, then co-founder of Rubrik), T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore (reported)
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, California; offices including Bangalore, London and other locations (reported)
- Ownership / structure
- Private, venture-backed; investors include Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Sequoia, Coatue, ICONIQ, Altimeter, DST Global, Sapphire, Craft, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Wellington Management and others (reported)
- Leadership (2026)
- Arvind Jain (co-founder and CEO); co-founders in engineering roles; other executives not verified in this batch
- AI products
- Glean Search (2021); Glean Assistant (generative chat over company data, from 2023; third generation September 2025); Glean Apps and APIs (June 2024); Glean Agents (February 2025, generally available 20 May 2025); Enterprise Graph and a second-generation agentic engine (September 2025)
- Scale
- ARR $100m in the fiscal year to January 2025 (company, February 2025); $200m (company, 8 December 2025); ~$300m (late May 2026, reported); customer count and headcount not verified in this batch
- Capital raised
- ~$765m across six rounds by mid-2025 (reported, verify): Series C ~$100m led by Sequoia at ~$1bn (May 2022, reported); Series D >$200m at $2.2bn (February 2024); Series E >$260m at $4.6bn co-led by Altimeter and DST (10 September 2024); Series F $150m at $7.2bn led by Wellington (10 June 2025)
- Key partnerships
- Connectors to 100+ enterprise applications (company); model access through Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI and Amazon Bedrock; AWS Marketplace AI Agents and Tools category (July 2025)
- Signature moves (incl. failures)
- Neutral enterprise search (2019); the Sequoia unicorn round (2022); the generative-assistant pivot (2023); two up-rounds in seven months (2024); Glean Agents (2025); $100m ARR and the $7.2bn Series F (2025); Salesforce's Slack data restrictions (2025); suite-bundling pressure and the $300m-ARR "AI budget" pitch (2026)
8 strategic moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2019
Founding and Neutral Enterprise Search
Founding
2022
Series C Sequoia Unicorn Round
Funding round
2023
Generative Assistant and Work AI Pivot
Launch / pivot
2024
Series D and E Valuation Doubling
Funding round
2025
100m ARR and the Series F
Funding round (with revenue milestone)
2025
Glean Agents Platform
Launch
2025
Salesforce Slack API Restrictions
Platform dispute / regulatory-style constraint (pressure on Glean; the move was Salesforce's)
2026
Suite Bundling Pressure and the 300m ARR Pitch
Repositioning under competitive pressure