Glean Secures $200Million Series D to Advance Enterprise Generative AI Deployment

Glean, the AI-powered work assistant making waves among CIOs under pressure to quickly and securely deploy generative AI in the enterprise, has raised over $200 million in Series D funding at a $2.2B valuation. The round was led by existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital, new investors Coatue, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Latitude Capital, and Adams Street, strategic investors Capital One Ventures, Citi, Databricks Ventures, and Workday Ventures, and with support from existing investor General Catalyst. The funding will accelerate Glean’s momentum as it meets sharp customer demand from enterprises and as companies race to implement generative AI in their businesses.

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“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”

Founded by former Google search engineers in 2019, Glean started as a turnkey enterprise search and knowledge management solution connecting to over 100 SaaS apps. In spring 2023, Glean quickly emerged as the industry-leading enterprise generative AI solution with the launch of its conversational AI assistant that uses Glean’s state-of-the-art search and RAG technology to retrieve the most relevant information for LLMs to generate personalized answers grounded in each enterprise’s unique knowledge graph. All answers generated are secure, private, permissions-aware, and fully referenceable back to source documentation in the enterprise. Most recently, Glean introduced its low-code and no-code centralized AI platform, allowing companies to build custom generative AI experiences grounded in their company knowledge.

Glean has seen incredible demand for its solution, and in the last year, Glean has nearly quadrupled its annual recurring revenue. Glean has also signed new customers, including BILL, Canva, and Sony Electronics.

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“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. “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.”

Glean’s funding comes as CIOs are under mounting pressure to deploy generative AI across their organizations. A recent survey of CIOs by Glean found that 78 percent of respondents believe generative AI will be critical to their organization’s productivity.

“The opportunity for Glean is enormous, and we have so much conviction in the team’s ability to provide the generative AI solution for the enterprise that we co-led this round after investing in every round prior to this, after leading their Series A in 2019,” said Mamoon Hamid, partner, Kleiner Perkins. “I’ve spent my venture career investing in applications that enable knowledge workers to be more productive, whether it’s Slack, Box, or Figma, and see huge potential in Glean to change the way that people work. The tremendous growth and customer demand that they’ve seen over the last year is best-in-class, and no team is better suited to deliver safe, responsible generative AI that can be used across businesses of all sizes and sectors.”

“Building the best search product and a powerful retrieval engine is essential to making generative AI work in the enterprise, and making it safe, reliable, and accurate,” said Ravi Mhatre, Partner at Lightspeed. “We’ve known and worked with Arvind for more than 20 years, and we know there are very few people with the technical expertise and vision that he has and can accomplish what Glean has set out to do.”