Glean raises $100M series C at $1B valuation to power search and discovery across workplace SaaS apps

Today I’m thrilled to share that Glean has raised a $100M series C led by Sequoia at a $1B valuation.

We came out of stealth just over half a year ago, and since then, we’ve been hard at work to deliver a powerful, unified search experience to all of our customers, so that employees can search across all their company’s apps to find exactly what they need and discover the things they should know. Glean understands who individuals are, what they’re working on, and who they’re working with, to instantly deliver highly personalized results. Instead of wasting time digging for the information they need, employees save 2-3 hours per week by using Glean, so they can focus on their real work. 

This milestone comes at a time when the workplace has fundamentally changed. SaaS sprawl has accelerated and a global pandemic has made remote and hybrid work environments into the new normal. This presents huge challenges for companies who care about employee experience—ensuring their employees can find answers to their questions, access the information they need, and stay connected not only to company knowledge, but also to each other.

“As a global company that’s scaling faster than ever, we have to make sure our team members have the information they need to do their most important work and help our customers solve their biggest challenges with data,” said Joel Thomas, Solution Architecture and Field Engineering at Databricks, a Glean customer. “Glean streamlines this experience and helps ensure everyone on the team can find the right information in a timely manner. Moreover, Glean was able to understand and self-learn our company specific domain and acronyms without any manual setup. This was key in providing accurate and personalized search results." 

Employers are desperate for a solution

In today’s increasingly complex workplace, employers are desperate to prevent knowledge loss and employee burnout. A recent study revealed that employed Americans on average spend 25% of their work week looking for the documents, information, or people they need to do their jobs. This is so draining that 43% say they’d consider leaving their jobs if their employer didn’t provide them with an easy/efficient way to access the information and people they need to get their jobs done.

Due to the recent SaaS explosion, company knowledge now lives in more places than ever. Remote and hybrid work compound the issue: informal knowledge sharing channels don’t exist, employees lack visibility into what’s happening across the company, and social isolation makes employees feel less connected to their work and organization. This drag on employee experience is fueling the "Great Resignation."

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Customers are quickly embracing Glean

I actually began my journey as a prospective Glean customer—except there was no Glean product available to purchase. At the time, I was a co-founder at Rubrik, which was experiencing the pains of rapid growth. In our annual employee pulse survey, employees cited not being able to find the information they needed as their biggest productivity challenge. I quickly learned that other companies were experiencing the same issues, but after searching far and wide for a solution, I couldn’t find anything that met our needs. So I convinced my co-founders to join me in building the solution.

Since launching this past September, we’ve seen incredible customer engagement. For the first time, knowledge workers not only have the ability to search for exactly what they need, but also discover knowledge and people who can help them move faster. Glean’s ability to connect with all of a company’s applications in under two hours (as opposed to months of implementation that was previously the industry standard) is also driving rapid customer adoption.

Thank you to our partners

Our progress to date was of course made possible by our incredible partners. We’re honored to power search and discovery across all workplace SaaS apps for over 70 customers. We are so grateful for their partnership, which has been and will continue to be critical to Glean’s success.

We’d also like to thank our investors—Sequoia, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, The Slack Fund, and others—for sharing and supporting our vision for a world where everyone everywhere can glean exactly the information they need to do big things. 

Our mission is to bring people the knowledge they need to make a difference in the world. While I’m proud of everything our team has accomplished to-date and am excited for this milestone, we know that this is just the beginning.

If you’d like to join us on this journey, request a demo or check out our open positions on our careers page.