The Future of Enterprise Search: Glean
Announcing Lightspeed Growth’s Series C Investment in Glean
Enterprise search is grueling and burdensome. We’ve all felt the pain of working on your computer or being on zoom, and all of a sudden you can’t find that document, spreadsheet, slack message, or email that referenced this or that. Despite having a search bar readily available in our personal lives for years on our mobile device, laptop, or Apple watch, we’ve never really had this tool in our work lives.
Enter Glean–the connective tissue used by employees to help them find exactly what they need, right when they need it. It’s the right solution built by the right team, at the right time.
With an explosion of SaaS applications across the enterprise, an increased amount of friction and data silos has emerged within and across internal teams. Glean has created a unified search platform and knowledge assistant that sits across a company’s applications and core data sets, allowing for users to easily search and access internal documents and data.
Glean’s product goes beyond basic search functionality to include contextual information — activity on the item, interactions by others, related knowledge — as well as functionality to enhance knowledge — question / answers, verifications of ‘answers’ by an owner, etc. The product has its own application and is also immersed in other ‘home page’ product spaces such as email, Slack, and browser extension.
We’ve been fortunate to know Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, for more than 20 years. He was a founding engineer of Lightspeed portfolio company Riverbed, and subsequently we had the pleasure of working alongside him as co-founder of Lightspeed portfolio company, Rubrik. In between Riverbed and Rubrik, Arvind helped build Google’s core search product. During that time, Arvind realized that searching for information or resources internally at Google as an employee was significantly more challenging for employees than typing into Google was for consumers. When he outlined his insights around this problem to us, we knew he was one of the few people with both the technical depth and big vision to build a compelling product in this space.
Today, Glean saves more than 2 hours per employee per week across functions, from engineering to sales and success teams, giving back roughly an extra day in the month to users. The team has already partnered with brands such as Okta, Databricks, Confluent, Grammarly, Samsara, Outreach, and many others.
We are proud to have co-led Glean’s initial funding in 2019 and participated in the Series B in September 2021. The Lightspeed Growth Team is excited today to be investing in their Series C as we triple down on our belief in the team, vision and product.
We’re looking forward to the next chapter with Glean. If you’re interested in joining their incredible team, check out their careers page below:
By Ravi Mhatre, James Ephrati, and Ansaf Kareem
