The Google for Work

Who is Glean in AI? The Enterprise AI Search market is more complicated than you think. Can productivity be improved in Enterprise level companies?

Hey Everyone,

It’s fairly rare I talk about the B2B world, but for revenue from Generative AI as a movement, it’s exceeding important going forwards.

(☝—💎For a limited time get a Yearly sub for just $5 a month✨— ☝).

Why Enterprise Adoption Matters for Gen AI

Global enterprise spending on generative AI is projected to rocket from $16 billion in 2023 to $143 billion in 2027 and account for 28% of AI expenditures, according to tech research and advisory firm IDC.

Enterprise AI is evolving and at the intersection of the future of business and it’s important that Generative AI builds real tools that are valuable to actual firms of all sizes, and very large Enterprise customers as well.

It’s one thing to find a hit with consumers, that can change relatively fast, but that B2B revenue turns out to be fairly important over time.

API revenue from frontier models for example, is primarily B2B (business-to-business). Nobody can hope to luck out and launch the next ChatGPT that was a unique moment in time in late 2022. But that momentum is reverberating and changing companies and Enterprises from the inside out.

OpenAI vs. Anthropic

Graph by

Tanay Jaipuria

adapted by

Rich Holmes

of Department of Product Newsletter.

In the mid 2020s its Enterprise AI Revenue that Scales

Enterprise AI revenue is becoming more important in how Generative AI continues to evolve as we head from 2024 into 2025 in the months ahead. The way professionals use Perplexity, ChatGPT and other search tools like Genspark to find information is different from a few years ago. But for many kinds of searches, these tools are not appropriate.

As I analyze emerging tech and AI, a lot of what I do is track and try to understand what technology startups are aiming to build and which companies are proving to be winners

These are the five AI startups Sam Altman has asked OpenAI's recent investors to avoid backing:

🛑 Anthropic
🛑 xAI (Elon Musk)
🛑 Safe Superintelligence (Ilya Sutskever)
🛑 Perplexity
🛑 Glean, who?

The first four make a lot of sense and are known to many AI enthusiasts, but the last one? Not so much. Let’s talk today about Glean AI.

• I wanted to go into a bit about what Glean does as one of the most feared competitors of OpenAI themselves. I believe Glean’s revenue growth trajectory points to it being a future winner in the Enterprise AI for work space.

• Glean's annualized revenue grew to $39 million in January 2024, marking a 4x growth from the $10 million recorded in 2023.

Work AI for All

Glean is the Work AI platform connected to your enterprise's data. Find, create, and automate anything. Explore what Work AI can do for you!

In early September, 2024 Glean raised over $260M in a Series E. It was launched in 2019. Its founders are Arvind Jain (CEO), T.R. Vishwanath (CTO, formerly at Meta and Microsoft), Tony Gentilcore (Product Engineering, formerly at Google), Piyush Prahladka (now CEO of his own stealth startup).

The Work AI platform connected to all your data.

Glean is yet another AI-search company you may not have heard of. Glean competes with a herd of well-financed generative AI startups as well as tech giants, taking on Microsoft Copilot while aiming to disrupt a field of cognitive search tool providers such as Perplexity.

• Glean was founded by a seasoned team of former Google search engineers and industry veterans.

Enterprise AI Search - Work AI platform

click to watch the video: 🎥 2:31

Glean wants to expand human potential to do extraordinary work! The recent round values the tech company at $4.6 billion. Find, create, and automate anything using the Glean Platform. So this startup could be a winner of the Generative AI era.

“I spoke with other CEOs to see if they had solutions I’d missed. Their response was, ‘If you find something like that, let us know.’” - Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean (via Sequoia blog)

Work AI for all

Glean has a number a suite of a number of fascinating products:

• Work AI Platform

• AI-Powered Workspace Search

• Customer Testimonials and Stories

Founded by a Google Search Alumni

“In the years since arriving at Google and working on Google Search, Arvind Jain had left his mark on a series of other projects. He had helped engineer YouTube’s video serving system—which pulled up videos related to a user’s search, but also recommended content based on their browsing history. Jain had also worked on the search functions for Google Maps, which were more technically ambitious by far than Google Search and YouTube.” Years later, Arvind Jain would go on to found Glean AI.

Can RAG based Search Augment Worker Productivity?

In terms of B2B and AI workplace tools that are RAG based, Glean specializes in enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) and search capabilities that have the opportunity to scale rather well.

The startups focuses on enhancing workplace productivity by providing a unified search tool that aggregates information from various applications, allowing users to access critical data efficiently.

How is search changing for companies and workplaces in the era of Generative AI? It might be one of the most enduring questions of the hype cycle. Thinking about use cases of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) boils down to AI being really good at summarization and what’s the actual ROI of that for companies? The trajectory of Glean AI thus follows an expected path.

I expect in the next few years for the Enterprise AI search space to become a lot more consolidated into the first winners of the Generative AI wave. I expect Glean AI to win it, at least in the pure-play RAG category.

[This is not a sponsored post]. But I’m very interested in doing more deep dives on the Generative AI winners you might not have heard about.

“Search engines are notoriously difficult to build—they require crawlers sophisticated enough to index data in a multitude of formats in real time and algorithms smart enough to sort and rank that data with precision for any given search.”

• How can Enterprise companies increase their productivity.

• What can Glean AI’s funding round tell us about its trajectory in this B2B category and as a Generative AI winner?

• Who are the competitors of Glean AI and can they disrupt the Enterprise Search market?

• Remember, Glean was founded just five years ago!

The Biggest Generative AI use case is Search

If you think about it, Glean is also taking on familiar rivals. Glean aims to disrupt a field of cognitive search tool providers such as Perplexity, Coveo, Sinequa and Lucidworks.  You can view some of the others in the most comprehensive list of competitors below.

How we do search at work is changing. Its products so far mostly include generative AI search capabilities and an assistive search tool designed to streamline access to information across platforms. This is hard to do well, and the winner in this space can branch out into new products.

Other Competitors

While I’m not a B2B or Enterprise search expert, in late 2024, the following companies are sometimes mentioned as competitors to Glean AI in the Enterprise AI space:

• Elastic Search (who now also have Generative AI tools)

• Google Cloud Search

• Dashworks AI

• Lucidworks Fusion

• Apache Solr (Open-Source)

• Anaconda

• Curiosity AI

• Outmind

• Coveo

• Cohere

• Copernic

• GoSearch

• GetGuru

• Voyage AI

• Equinix

Enterprise Pivot to Generative AI

Just as many companies built internal chatbots (2022 to 2024) based on their own proprietary data for their employees, getting access to the right information is seen as a productivity enhancer at many larger firms and enterprise work places.

With Claude for Enterprise, ChatGPT for Enterprise, and various Microsoft Copilots, most employees already know which BYOIA, bring your own AI tools they prefer for their workflows but company search still needs to be handled properly.

Glean’s Revenue will Surprise in 2025

So with the plethora of AI startups, you need to watch actual revenue growth. Where companies like Cohere (the OpenAI of Canada) or Mistral (the OpenAI of France) might struggle in the Generative AI space, I don’t think Glean will.

Glean AI has demonstrated remarkable growth in its revenue, reaching an annualized figure of $39 million by January 2024. This marks a significant increase from the $10 million recorded in 2023, showcasing a 4x growth within a year.

More details of 2024 Fundraising Round

Glean’s Series E funding came less than seven months after the company raised more than $200 million in a late-stage round that valued it at $2.2 billion. This points to revenue momentum. 4x is also what OpenAI expects in 2025, as a best case scenario.

It’s hard to find a B2B AI winner like this, it’s sometimes not even possible. Glean’s generative artificial intelligence platform differs from consumer-oriented services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT by including features that are unique to business scenarios.

Arvind Jain knows a thing or two about startups, he was at Google for over a decade and then helped found Rubrik. He’s today in 2024 one of the most important people in AI powered productivity.

Glean is also attracting new investors due to its useful product and quickly accelerating revenue. Their recent Series E round was led by Altimeter and DST Global, includes Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, all new investors in the company.

A lot of key VCs are backing Glean AI, and this is a usual sign that a startup is on the right track. Existing investors in the round included Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital.

What if Google and ChatGPT had a Baby but for Enterprise?

Jain has described Glean as Google and ChatGPT for businesses.

2024 has seen some consolidation and a lot more unicorns. As many as 36 generative AI startups have become unicorns, according to CB Insights, as valuations surged and corporate investors Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have participated with strong leadership in the march.

Jain began researching search engines for enterprises, but none could do what he imagined. “I spoke with other CEOs to see if they had solutions I’d missed,” Jain says. “Their response was, ‘If you find something like that, let us know.’” - Sequoia Op-Ed

Arvind’s trifecta work at Google, Rubrik and Glean is going to be fairly legendary one day in the B2B AI world.

Can Enterprise search augment worker productivity?

Glean AI's unique value proposition lies in its ability to seamlessly integrate advanced AI technologies with enterprise search capabilities, creating a powerful platform that enhances productivity and knowledge management within organizations.

Glean has a foot in the door in knowledge management, virtual assistants, document lifecycle management, enhanced knowledge hubs and various related activities. Enterprise search branches into many other potential apps organizations are using customized to their own needs.

Glean offers a chat and low-code/no-code centralized AI platform for companies to build on.

For these reasons I’m fairly bullish on the prospects of Glean AI’s future as an Enterprise AI leader and rising competitor to the likes of frontier model builders, Perplexity and more niche players.

Glean counts Reddit, Pinterest, and Databricks, and others among its customers. Read more customer stories. Deploying AI in the enterprise environment has never been easier.