Glean raises over $260M series E and launches next-generation prompting to accelerate its vision of Work AI for all

Today, we’re excited to announce new funding and new product capabilities that together will enable Glean’s Work AI platform to expand its reach — enabling everyday AI for everyone at work.

Businesses today are in the midst of an AI transformation — one that promises to be as big or bigger than the internet, mobile, cloud, and other major technology shifts of the past century. CIOs are in the thick of it. Not only are they under immense pressure to quickly and securely bring AI into their organizations, but they’re simultaneously grappling with enabling their employees to be successful with AI. I’ve heard a common refrain from many CIOs: it all comes down to the people. You can’t drive AI transformation in a company without first getting its employees to embrace AI. After all, it’s AI-centric employees who will ultimately create AI-centric companies. 

This gets right to the heart of our mission at Glean: expand human potential to do extraordinary work. We believe that every employee, in every role, in every company, can leverage AI daily to exponentially increase their impact. It’s the key to enabling them to focus on their most meaningful work that will ultimately drive the best outcomes for employees and businesses alike.

But building AI into everyone’s daily work isn’t easy. Today’s well-known AI tools were designed for consumers, not businesses. To make AI work at work, it needs to connect and deeply understand all the data, people, processes, and context specific to your work. It also needs to be intuitive enough for everyone to use, yet powerful enough to do real work. And, of course, it needs to be secure and trustworthy enough to be relied upon at work. This is exactly what we’re building at Glean: Work AI for all. It’s an ambitious vision that gets all of us at Glean excited to wake up every day and build transformative AI solutions for our customers. We win when our customers win; and our customers win when each and every one of their employees has the power of AI in their everyday work.

Today’s news of new funding and expanded capabilities for our Work AI platform — as well as a refreshed brand look — is a leap forward in turning this vision into reality.

Glean raises over $260M series E funding at a $4.6B valuation

We’re thrilled to announce we’ve raised over $260M in new funding at a $4.6B valuation, and welcome new investors Altimeter and DST Global, who co-led the round, as well as Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 to the Glean family. We’re also grateful for continued support from existing investors Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital, who also participated in this round. Our investors have been true partners in building Glean from day one.

Seeing Glean’s valuation more than double in just over six months is both humbling and also underscores how delivering Work AI for all has created the most incredible opportunity for customers, investors, partners, and employees. 

I’ve had several folks ask me why we raised this round given the sizable round we raised earlier this year. Did we need to raise this latest round? No. In fact, after this round we now have over $550M cash on hand, combined with a rapidly growing business that allows us to fuel continued innovation organically. But we’ve only seen demand for Glean accelerate over the past year, and now is the time to meet the growing needs of our customers, some of whom are the largest enterprises in the world. I’m more confident than ever that we’re set up to deliver. 

It starts with our team. We’ve amassed a world-class team of builders— across R&D, GTM, and G&A— and have scaled to over 500 employees globally. This team has built and delivered a product and experience that customers love. In just the past year, Glean more than tripled its business, and we are now seeing broad adoption across industries and geographies, with Glean customers representing many of the “top 10 largest” companies across telecommunications, banking, retail, travel, social networking, manufacturing, semiconductors, and electronics.

But perhaps the most exciting stats for our team are around user adoption, daily usage, and love for Glean. Work AI for all doesn’t become a reality unless Glean delivers a product and experience that is used in everyone’s everyday work. If you think about what tools you use to do your work every single day, my guess is that this list is pretty short: chat (Slack, Teams, or other), email, calendar, video conferencing, and your office productivity suite of choice. Our customers tell us that Glean’s Work AI Assistant is quickly becoming the first new tool on this list in a decade. Indeed, when we look at usage stats, Glean Assistant users average 5 queries per day, about as often as people typically search the web with Google. And across Glean’s customer base, we are seeing an average of ~40% DAU/MAU (daily active users over monthly active users— a signal of user engagement), far exceeding the 10-20% DAU/MAU for typical enterprise SaaS solutions.

The best way to sum up the type of customer love we’re so grateful to have is from a Glean user who recently effused, “Glean is a second brain for me… will not work without it ever again.”

Introducing next-generation prompting: expanding AI use “beyond the box”

At the turn of the century, Google added the now ubiquitous search bar interface over its powerful machine learning models, making consumer search and discovery accessible to anyone who could type a few words into a box. Fast forward, AI became a household buzzword earlier last year, when OpenAI added a chat interface to their GPT model, finally making it accessible to anyone who could type a few words into a box. But in under two years, that “simple box” has become limiting. AI models are advancing at break-neck speed, yet users often get stuck in very simple use cases, typing just a few words into the box. Anyone who’s tried using AI assistants has encountered the reality that prompt engineering is hard. And why do users need to start with a blank box every time anyway? While AI power users are emerging, it’s just as common for their coworkers one seat over to be stuck staring at “the box”... intimidated by AI and not sure where to begin. It’s time to go beyond the box.

Today Glean is introducing next-generation prompting with a set of advanced prompting capabilities that expand the use of Glean’s Work AI platform to new users, use cases, and surfaces.

• Advanced prompts. Advanced prompts are new multi-step prompts that automate complex analysis and workflows by employing multi-step RAG for more intricate reasoning. Users can create advanced prompts with natural language, instructing Glean to conduct multiple retrieval and reasoning steps, and build on the output of each preceding step.
• Prompt builder. Prompt builder is a new studio creation tool for simplifying prompt engineering, allowing users to create, edit, test, iterate on, and save prompts. Users can easily link to and share prompts with their teammates, and teammates can continue building and iterating on their own versions of those prompts.
• Prompt library. Every organization will have its own prompt library, including suggested prompts from Glean, as well as the prompts that the organization’s own users have saved and shared to their organization’s prompt library. All employees can discover helpful prompts for their daily work, and teams, departments, and companies can curate the best prompts for everyone. Explore our online prompt library to see prompts already in use today.
• Glean Assist for Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud. Customer support teams can now use Glean directly inside key customer service applications like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud. This new embedded experience enables customer support reps and customer success managers to serve customers and close tickets faster, right inside the apps they use daily.

To learn more about Glean’s next-generation prompting capabilities, watch today’s Glean GO: Beyond the box fall ‘24 launch event, where you’ll see demos of Sales, Engineering, and Support employees putting these new prompts into action in their everyday work. If you’re one of the many organizations looking for a way to transform your employees and business with Work AI, we’d love to give you a personalized demo today!