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The ever-increasing volume of data and applications continues to flood the digital workplace, making it more challenging for users to find data. A recent survey by Gartner found that nearly half (47 percent) of digital workers struggle to find information needed to effectively perform their job tasks.
Glean Technologies Inc., an AI-powered enterprise search and knowledge discovery solutions provider, can help users surface answers from vast pools of data, and with the latest funding round, the platform is expected to get even better.
The AI company has raised over $200M at a $2.2B valuation in its Series D funding round this week. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins. The new funding will help accelerate Glean’s momentum by enabling it to meet the sharp rise in customer demand from companies racing to implement GenAI in their businesses.
Other investors that participated in the funding round included existing investors Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst, and new investors ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Databricks Ventures, Citi, Capital One Ventures, and Workday Ventures.
Glean uses state-of-the-art enterprise search and RAG technology to retrieve the most up-to-date and relevant information for LLMS to use. According to Glean, its platform has over 100 pre-built connectors that allow it to retrieve data from apps like Google Drive, Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and more.
Not only does the platform index information in those applications, but also takes into account the access permissions. For example, if a user doesn’t have access to a certain file, Glean won’t use data from the file in its AI responses to that user.
Founded by former Google search engineers in 2019, Glean started as a turnkey enterprise search and knowledge management solution. The company quickly emerged as the industry-leading GenAI solution with the launch of its AI assistant.
“We are at the beginning of one of the biggest transformations in technology; generative AI is an incredibly powerful technology that will unleash productivity and new efficiencies, but it must be applied in the right ways to be useful and safe in the enterprise,” says Arvind Jain, co-founder, and CEO of Glean.
Jain further added, “Our approach to bringing generative AI into the enterprise has centered around the powerful search and RAG technology that’s critical for making LLMs useful in the enterprise, and the customer success we’ve seen in the last year validates our approach.”
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With the skyrocketing demand for its solutions, Glean has almost quadrupled its annual recurring revenue in the last year. According to CNBC, annualized revenue is $39 million, up from $10 million last year. Some of the new customers include Sony Electronics, BILL, and Canva.
Since the last funding round in 2022, where Glean raised $100 million in Series C, the company has achieved several milestones including the launch of Glean Chat and the introduction of their low-code/no-code centralized AI platform.
The leadership at Glean has played an influential role in its success. Before launching Glean, Arvind Jain was a distinguished engineer at Google LLC, where he spent over a decade leading various teams. He was also a member of Rubrik Inc.’s founding team. In a blog post, Jain shared “Glean Assistant users average 14 queries per day (compared to Google’s average of 3-4), and Glean users save an average of 2-3 hours per employee per week.”
In a recent interview with Datanami, Jain said “Companies should think of AI as a technology that they can use, that they can buy, that they can incorporate that into their business processes, into their products without having to sort of worry about building talent to start building models.”
Glean is planning to launch a market expansion initiative to maintain its recent momentum. As part of the expansion plan, Glean is reportedly looking to double its workforce by the end of the year and target sectors beyond the tech industry, such as the financial services, manufacturing, and retail segments.
With its robust technology, support of major investors, and strategic expansion plans, Glean appears to be all set to lead the next wave of GenAI innovation.
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