Glean Debuts with Launch of an Intuitive Work Assistant That Puts Knowledge Of A Company In the Hands Of Its Workers

September 15, 2021 at 09:15 AM EDT

Company secures $55M in funding; 40 customers and is founded by Co-Founder of Rubrik with a team of ex-Google/Facebook top technical talent

Glean today 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 customers save 2.5 weeks a year per employee, freeing up time to focus on higher-value work that matters to their company.

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Search Results (Graphic: Business Wire)

Armed with $55M 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."

An Acute and Growing Problem

The frustrating, wasteful time employees spend trying to find the information they need to do their jobs is nothing new. Today, it is just becoming exponentially harder. With the average company sporting almost 300 apps (and counting), information lives in more places than ever before; knowledge is scattered, and native search in applications is poor. Today's remote/hybrid environments compound these problems: informal communication channels no longer exist; employees lack visibility across the organization.

The resulting organizational drag wastes time, destroys productivity and saps energy.

Knowledge workers waste 20 percent of their time — more than one day per week — looking for the information to do their jobs (McKinsey).
They average over 6 hours per week duplicating work that has already been done by a current or former coworker (Asana, 2020).
On top of that, context switching between a dozen apps 30 times per day and dealing with interruptions every 3-11 minutes (UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science) leads to burnout. It is fueling the "Great Resignation" trend.

Time for a New Solution: Glean

For the first time, knowledge workers now have the tools to empower work and deliver productivity gains from new technologies that we enjoy in our personal lives but aren't yet seeing at work. 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."

"As organizations become more distributed and knowledge becomes more fragmented, having an intuitive work assistant like Glean is not only a nice to have, but a critical piece of employee productivity," said Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins. "What Arvind and team have developed will change the way companies get work done in a big way."

"The nature of how work gets done is fundamentally changing, and access to the information and individuals that can help you get the job done is evolving," said Ravi Mhatre, Partner, Lightspeed. "I'm excited to see Glean give us the same ability to search and discover at work that we take for granted in our personal lives. It makes work that much easier to get done."

About Glean

Glean is the work assistant with intuition. It finds exactly what you need, right when you need it — making it easier for you and your team to get big things done. It searches all of your apps across your entire company, understanding context, language, behavior, and relationships with others to find personalized answers to your questions. It surfaces knowledge and makes connections with the people who can help. Glean is led by Arvind Jain (Google, Co-Founder of Rubrik), Chris O'Neill (Google, former CEO of Evernote), T.R. Vishwanath (Microsoft, Facebook), Piyush Prahladka (Google, Uber), and Tony Gentilcore (Google), with funding from General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and The Slack Fund. Follow us at www.glean.com and on LinkedIn and Twitter.