42. Glean
Glean is a Silicon Valley-based company focused on analyzing enterprise data to create answers and automate work. Built with the ambitious goal of enabling employees to "find exactly what they need" across all workplace tools, Glean has quickly become a central player in the AI-enhanced knowledge and productivity management space.
The company's core product is an AI-powered enterprise search platform that integrates with a wide array of workplace apps — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, fellow Disruptors Canva and Notion, and dozens more. Its founding team includes veterans from Google, Meta, and Dropbox.
Rather than simply indexing documents, Glean uses natural language understanding and machine learning to create a personalized knowledge graph for each user. This allows for context-aware, intent-driven search results that reflect not only the content of documents but also organizational structure, user behavior, and collaborative relationships. While initially focused on tech industry customers, Glean has expanded to finance, retail and manufacturing.
Glean recently released an agentic, AI-powered index of enterprise knowledge that can grab data from every worker's interactions no matter where they are located. With over 100 million Glean AI agent actions a year, it is helping the technology develop at a faster pace.
"With every agent in your enterprise now centralized, grounded in enterprise context, fully secured, and built to scale, Glean makes moving agents from experimentation to production an out-of-the-box reality," Glean CEO Arvind Jain said in a blog post.
In 2024, the company released Glean Apps and Glean APIs to aid its clients in building custom generative AI apps and agents. It also released updated prompting capabilities, which included advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multi-step prompts. This allowed for more precise and context-aware answers. Glean also expanded AI model support in partnership with fellow Disruptor Anthropic's Claude.
Despite its strong momentum, Glean faces several challenges. The enterprise AI space has become increasingly crowded, with competition from Microsoft 365 Copilot, Amazon Q Business and ChatGPT Enterprise. Another wave of startups, and fellow Disruptors including Perplexity and Writer, also threaten its position. Still, many investors are betting on Glean as a key player in the future of enterprise technology. The company raised $250 million in a round led by Altimeter and DST Global in September 2024 at a valuation of $4.6 billion. Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 became new investors in the company at the time. It also added Citibank as an investor earlier last year, which has conducted a pilot with its technology.
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