AI-powered search startup Glean announced on Tuesday that it has raised $260 million in a Series E funding round, valuing the company at $4.6 billion — more than double its previous valuation. The Palo Alto-based firm, founded in 2019, has now raised over $600 million from more than 20 investors.
The latest funding round was led by Altimeter and DST Global, with new investors Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 also participating. Existing backers, including Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital, also joined the round.
Glean competes in the highly competitive generative AI space, taking on both tech giants like Microsoft, with its Copilot product, and other cognitive search tool providers such as Perplexity, Coveo, Sinequa, and Lucidworks.
Founded by Arvind Jain, along with former Google engineers, Glean initially launched as an enterprise search engine but has since pivoted to focus on generative AI. Jain describes Glean as "Google and ChatGPT for businesses," offering conversational AI tools to help organizations efficiently search through internal data, retrieve information, and provide rapid answers. Jain is also a co-founder of Rubrik, which successfully went public in April.
In a blog post accompanying the announcement, Jain emphasized that businesses are undergoing a major AI transformation, which he believes will be as impactful as previous technological shifts like the internet, mobile, and cloud. Global enterprise spending on generative AI is expected to surge from $16 billion in 2023 to $143 billion by 2027, according to IDC.
The rapid rise of AI has fueled record-breaking investment levels, with startups in the sector seeing five times the funding compared to the previous year. According to CB Insights, 36 generative AI startups have now achieved unicorn status as valuations soar, with tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google playing significant roles in the investment surge.