• Glean recently raised over $260 million in a Series E funding round at a valuation of $4.6 billion.
• Jain previously founded Rubrik, a public cybersecurity company, and was an engineer at Google.
• Glean powers enterprise search by integrating with multiple software applications and retrieving relevant answers.

Following the latest news from OpenAI Fundraising of $6.6 billion, CEO Sam Altman insisted investors avoid investing in five AI rivals, reported Reuters. Among them are Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI. Safe superintelligenceand start of AI research Perplexity.

The last of the five competitors, and perhaps the least known, is Glean, an enterprise research assistant. Founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain, co-founder of Rubrik and former Googler, Glean helps enterprise employees find insights within their company’s tools and data.

In September, Glean raised more than $260 million in a one-time Series E funding round. evaluation of $4.6 billion. Altimeter and DST Global co-led the latest round, which also included Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia, Coatue and Kleiner Perkins..

Glean helps businesses use AI by addressing a critical function for employees: search. “Every company has hundreds, some companies even have over a thousand different systems or applications,” Jain said. “As the years go by, we will have more and more information, more and more systems.” With so much data, it’s difficult for employees to find what they’re looking for. That can add up to more than two hours a day, Jain said.

The company enables AI search by integrating apps like Slack and Dropbox and optimizing search across its enterprise data universe.

Glean reached $50 million ARR over the summer and is expected to finish this year with $100 million ARR, according to a source familiar with the company’s finances. It is expected to reach $250 million by the end of next year, according to a close source. The startup’s clients include Reddit, Pinterest, Sony Electronics, Confluent, Databricks and Instacart.

Path to Entrepreneurship

Born and raised in Jaipur, an Indian city known for its historic forts and palaces, Jain was far from the world of technology growing up. “It had a very rural feel in the sense that everyone knows everyone in your town and no one really moves away.”

“I grew up thinking I would just help my family with whatever they did,” Jain said.

But in high school, Jain began studying for entrance exams at the highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) schools.

Jain excelled in mathematics and physics, two key subjects for exams, and as a result, he achieved exceptional results upon entering IIT Delhi. Out of hundreds of thousands of students across India, “his IIT rank was six,” said Deedy Das, who led product development at Glean and now works at Menlo Ventures.

At IIT Delhi, Jain studied computer science at the behest of one of the university advisors. “I was interested in pharmaceuticals,” he said. But “the advisors were quite forceful and told me I should study computer science… so it’s very accidental.” After completing his undergraduate degree, Jain moved to the United States to earn a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Washington.

Although engineering was accidental, the desire to become an entrepreneur was deliberate. His father owned “a bunch of small businesses… so he was also an entrepreneur in that sense,” Jain said.

In the late 1990s, Jain joined Seattle-based Microsoft and Akamai Technologies, which developed the first Internet video products. After founding a company, he partnered with Riverbed Technology, where he served as a founding engineer.

“No one told me what to do” at a startup, Jain said. “I really loved the whole startup experience.”

Technical brilliance

In 2003, Jain joined Google when the company was still in its early stages of growth.

Over the next eleven years, Jain worked on Google Maps, YouTube and Google Search. Even despite multiple efforts to be recruited by others to start a company, Jain felt inspired during his time at Google: “I felt really happy with the kind of opportunities I was given.”

Jain was one of Google’s first distinguished engineers and reported directly to Google’s founding CEO Larry Page, Das said. A Distinguished Engineer is level nine out of Google’s eleven levels that apply to engineers.

It was only after IIT alumnus Bipul Sinha came to him with an idea, which ended up becoming Rubrik, that Jain decided to take the plunge and start a company. Rubrik, a cybersecurity company focused on data protection and backup, went public in April and is valued at more than $7 billion.

“We have grown rapidly. We have broken many records in terms of how quickly our revenue has grown,” Jain said. But that growth came with cracks in the team’s execution, Jain said. There are productivity challenges: As a business grows, things inevitably slow down, he said.

According to an annual survey of Rubrik employees, one of the key areas for improvement was whether employees had access to the right information to do their jobs. Rubrik had hundreds of cloud-based software-as-a-service applications. “Our company’s knowledge was kind of fragmented between all of these systems,” he said.

“Our employees are complaining very loudly that I can’t find anything in this company. I don’t know where to go to get things,” Jain said.

After realizing that there was no product on the market that solved this problem, Jain decided to build it himself. His vision was a search engine that connected a company’s data across different applications and made it searchable by employees centrally.

“We had the opportunity to create Google for people in their professional lives,” and that’s how Glean was born.

Glean’s Work AI

Jain incubated Glean from the Kleiner Perkins office in 2019, said Mamoon Hamid, Glean board member and partner at Kleiner. Jain teamed up with TR Vishwanath, who serves as CTO, Tony Gentilcore, who leads product engineering, and Piyush Prahladka, who led research and is no longer with the company.

“They were in our basement for a good 18 months…I got to see the business really evolve from Arvind,” Hamid said.

At first, Jain spent his Sundays churning out code, Das said. “He’s so happy to get dirty…when I read Paul Graham’s essay in founder mode, I couldn’t think of anyone other than Arvind.

Glean’s initial focus was research. “The most fundamental thing we will do with Glean is you ask the question, it will surface the right information to you,” Jain said. Corporate research is “hard work and hard building,” Hamid said. “It’s seemingly easy, but actually quite difficult to create all the different connectors to different SaaS products and then create the search itself.”

Doing this securely and with elevated permissions presents a particularly difficult engineering challenge, said Rajeev Dham of Sapphire Ventures. Glean’s product, for example, prevents users from accessing information they’re not supposed to see, such as confidential financial data or HR reports.

In addition to enterprise search, Glean also has an AI assistant that generates responses based on search results, such as summarizing the day’s Slack messages or summarizing multiple documents.

Large Language Models (LLM) helped further strengthen Glean’s capabilities, Hamid added. “We’ve had a huge tailwind from LLM that we can now build into the product and truly make it not just a research tool, but also an AI work assistant.” With LLMs, Glean can also generate responses to employee queries, including entirely new documents.

Although Altman urges investors to avoid backing his competitors, Jain remains optimistic. “It’s always flattering to see this recognition,” Jain said. “The reason we’re probably on this list is because we built something important, something powerful, something that other people also aspire to build.”

In the race for enterprise AI, it also helps that Jain is extremely competitive. “Even when you play table tennis, ping pong or tennis, he will fight for that point,” Das said. “He doesn’t care who you are. You could be a new graduate, he doesn’t care. He’s going to fight to get this result.”

“I am a firm believer that businesses win or lose because of themselves and not because of competition,” Jain said.