PALO ALTO — Glean has emerged from stealth with the debut of an intuitive work assistant to address the ubiquitous problem for knowledge workers: finding the right information, the right teammate, or the right insights to get things done at work. At its core, Glean delivers a powerful, unified search experience that indexes dozens of applications, understanding context, language, behavior, and employee relationships, to find personalized answers to questions. Glean says customers can save 2.5 weeks a year per employee, freeing up time to focus on higher-value work that matters to their company.
Armed with $55 million in funding and already deployed at more than 40 companies, Glean was founded by Arvind Jain (Co-Founder of Rubrik and Google distinguished engineer), T.R. Vishwanath (Facebook), Piyush Prahladka (Google), and Tony Gentilcore (Google). Glean has several seasoned executives from Google, Facebook, Evernote, Intercom, and Pinterest. General Catalyst led the company’s most recent funding round, joining Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed, who co-led earlier funding rounds that included the Slack Fund.
“Glean is a game-changer,” said Manu Narayan at Confluent, an early Glean customer. “Everyone, everywhere has wasted countless hours reinventing the wheel because they couldn’t find what they were looking for or didn’t know it even existed. Glean solves that very fundamental problem. It is the connective tissue used by Confluent employees across the globe. As a rapidly growing organization with people spread across geographies and content across dozens of systems, Confluent relies on Glean to help us bridge gaps and reduce silos and drive efficiency.”
Glean provides a unified and personalized search experience over information that lives across the workplace. It also proactively surfaces knowledge and helps one connect with the people who can make it easier to get things done.
Glean’s ability to unify company knowledge and set up in under two hours (as opposed to months of implementation) is made possible by several recent technology advances upon which Glean is built:
- The standardization of modern workplace applications and availability of permission controls and ranking signals through APIs.
- Large-scale data and indexing infrastructure available in the public cloud.
- Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and deep learning allow advanced relevance models to be built without the need for constant manual “knob-turning” and tweaks.
“Glean has emerged at a time when organizations across the globe have adopted remote and hybrid work environments. This displacement has presented many challenges, especially when it comes to finding company information, getting personalized answers to specific questions, or just staying connected to colleagues,” said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean. “Our solution puts the company’s knowledge at the user’s fingertips, allowing them to quickly ‘glean’ the information they need, which leads to a more productive use of time and overall improved operational efficiency.”
“Enterprise search has long been a painful, unsolved problem for companies of every size – which is especially frustrating given that consumer tools serve up the right information to consumers effortlessly every day. Glean is looking to change that dynamic. By tackling this problem in today’s modern SaaS-fueled workscape, Glean is creating experiences that are more than just a blinking cursor in a textbox. This is innovation where we need it the most,” said Quentin Clark, Managing Director, General Catalyst. “General Catalyst is proud to work with Arvind and the entire Glean team as they work to make the power of company knowledge easily accessible and organized for every employee.”
