Glean: Bringing search to the workplace
By Ravi Mhatre and Ansaf Kareem
We’ve all felt the agony of working on your computer or being on a work call, and all of a sudden you can’t find that document, or that spreadsheet, or that slack message, or that email that referenced this or that. In our non-work lives, we’re used to having a search bar at our ready fingertips: Want to know the answer to who won the game this evening, or the restaurant you visited last night? Easy, just type it into a search bar on your computer or phone. Yet, despite heaving this readily available in our personal lives for several years, we’ve never really had this experience in our work lives.
Turns out, this is a tough problem to solve. In the past few years, with the explosion of SaaS offerings, on average companies use over 100 SaaS applications across their organizations, creating even more complexity and silos with regards to where information is being stored and how to get access to it at the right moment (and with the right security).
We knew we met the team to solve this extremely complex problem when we spoke to the Glean founders. We’ve been fortunate to know Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, for nearly 20 years now, first as a founding engineer of Lightspeed portfolio company Riverbed and then later as a co-founder of another Lightspeed portfolio company, Rubrik. In between Riverbed and Rubrik, Arvind was a distinguished engineer at Google where he worked on search and other related products. When he came to us outlining the problem (and, frankly, the lack of existence) of enterprise search, we knew he was likely one of the few people who would understand both the technical obstacles and behavioral nuances to be able to build a compelling product in this space. Arvind partnered with T.R. Vishwanath (former Facebook), Piyush Prahladka (former Google), and Tony Gentilcore (former Google) to start Glean, bringing together core search and consumer experience capabilities, and since has brought on several seasoned executives from Google, Facebook, Evernote, Intercom, and Pinterest.
Fast forward to today, we’re excited to announce the public launch of Glean. Glean solves the enterprise search problem by creating a horizontal, unified, and intuitive search assistant that indexes applications, understands context, language, behavior, and employee relationships in order to find personalized answers to specific questions. With over 40 paying customers, Glean saves 2 hours per employee per week across functions, from engineering to sales, giving back roughly an extra day in the month to users.
Lightspeed co-led the initial funding alongside our friends at Kleiner Perkins on Arvind’s idea and vision for this space. Over the past several months, Arvind and team have executed extremely fast and we are excited to announce their more recent funding led by General Catalyst, bringing their total fundraise to $55m.
We’ve been delighted to see Glean develop into a ‘home screen’ tool for the thousands of users they are already serving. We at Lightspeed believe Glean can transform day to day work the same way Google transformed consumer behavior on the web. It’s a bold vision, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Glean as they unfold the future.
