Glean Builds a Legitimate Unicorn, Gets Past $100M ARR

According to a recent report, the enterprise gen AI market is estimated to grow at 38% CAGR from $2.94 billion in 2024 to 2030, driven by the increasing need to use AI across hardware, software, and diverse applications. Palo Alto-based Glean has made big inroads in the industry.

Glean’s Offerings

Glean was founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain, a former Google engineer who previously co-founded Rubrik, along with Piyush Prahladka, Vishwanath T R, and Tony Gentilcore. The founding team recognized the challenges employees face in accessing relevant information across disparate enterprise systems. They wanted to create a unified search experience that could seamlessly integrate with various workplace applications to help improve employee efficiency. When I spoke with their CEO, Arvind Jain, a few years ago, he explained the founding idea behind Glean.

When the team started building Glean, they saw that one of the biggest issues with search was getting enterprise data. However, the new SaaS applications have good APIs that allow tools to connect and have access to all of that data and to most signals. During this time, Google also made the core search system available in the open domain. The team used these tools to build language models and semantic search capabilities that could focus on enterprise search capabilities.

Today, Glean’s platform offers an AI-powered enterprise search solution that connects with a company’s internal tools, such as Slack, Dropbox, and Google Workspace, to provide personalized and context-aware search results. Its Work AI Assistant is becoming among one of the fastest new tools with stellar user metrics. Glean reported that Assistant users average 5 queries per day, similar to the usage for Google. Glean’s customer base is also more active as it has seen an average of ~40% DAU/MAU compared with the more typical 10-20% DAU/MAU for enterprise SaaS solutions. Its platform is powering more than 100 million agent actions annually.

Glean’s Financials

Glean operates on a subscription-based model, targeting mid-market and enterprise customers. The company offers tiered pricing plans based on the number of users and the level of customization required. By 2020, Glean was already generating $3 million in revenues from its 45 customers. Earlier this year, Glean announced that it had achieved $100 million in ARR, compared with $50 million ARR reported in mid-2024. More details on financials have not been disclosed.

Glean has raised $765 million in funding so far from its 6 funding rounds. Earlier this week, it announced that it had completed a $150 million funding in a round led by Wellington Management at a valuation of $7.2 billion. In September 2024, the company raised over $260 million at a $4.6 billion valuation. An earlier round in February 2024 had valued Glean at $2.2 billion. The round was co-led by Altimeter and DST Global, with participation from existing investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Glean is using these funds to continue to accelerate its AI innovation, customer acquisition, and global expansion.

As organizations continue to seek efficient ways to manage and access their internal knowledge, AI-powered search platform focused on enterprise data sources will play an important role in improving workplace productivity. Glean is not the only player in the market though. Others like Coveo, Lucidworks, and Elastic offer a similar product. Additionally, there are services like Microsoft Copilot that are making bigger inroads into the enterprise segment.

Valuations in the late stage funding rounds have skyrocketed. $7.2B is a very high valuation even for a high quality company such as Glean. The absence of public market liquidity makes these numbers look a bit like Monopoly money.

Photo Credit: Markus Winkler on Unsplash