In an era defined by information overload and digital transformation, the challenge of finding relevant and accurate information within an organization continues to grow. Enterprises have seen a proliferation of independent software tools that contain useful information for employees across an organization. Amidst this fragmented digital ecosystem, Glean has emerged to guide employees and teams through the labyrinth of data silos they encounter on a daily basis, separating signal from noise in the form of personalized answers. Today, we are excited to announce that ICONIQ Growth is investing in Glean’s Series D funding round, a decision motivated by our belief in the company’s potential to redefine knowledge management for the modern enterprise.
From our initial discussions with Arvind and the Glean team, we were deeply impressed by their long-standing leadership and innovation in enterprise AI. Having worked on Search for many years at Google, they experienced firsthand the challenges of delivering a simultaneously powerful and user-friendly experience. Within the enterprise, data heterogeneity across a multitude of platforms requires sophisticated indexing and parsing capabilities to make the data searchable. Achieving relevant search results with fine-grained access controls had also been difficult prior to retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Glean’s use of its powerful search and RAG technology in its AI work assistant combines the strengths of both retrieval-based and generative approaches to produce answers precisely tailored to a query, while navigating disparate data formats and security considerations.
We repeatedly heard in our customer calls that Glean was a game-changer for enterprise search. The company’s platform significantly reduces the amount of time that employees need to search across internal documents and apps for the right piece of information. Marketing teams, developers, HR professionals and many other functions within the enterprise can derive value from Glean, leveraging it to quickly home in on the most relevant customer case study, code documentation or firmwide policy. As we conducted our diligence, we were also excited to learn of the array of customer profiles that were addressed, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies across many different tech stacks. Part of Glean’s special sauce is its seamless integrations with over 100 (and growing) enterprise applications, and its committed focus on enterprise search. We believe these offerings combine to deliver a superior customer experience to more generalized AI tooling.
As Glean continues to evolve, we are also excited about its long-term potential to help enable AI in the enterprise. At ICONIQ Growth, we believe that the era of Enterprise AI is only just beginning. Global leaders across our network are hyper-focused on using AI internally to unlock insights, drive creativity and enable their teams to be more productive. Glean offers the foundation for them to do exactly that. In addition to providing a powerful search experience, Glean’s knowledge graph empowers teams to build custom AI applications and workflows that systematize and automate common tasks within any function. We think Glean’s platform has broad implications for how employees will do their work in the future, and we look forward to seeing how enterprises choose to leverage it as part of their broader AI strategy.
Our team at ICONIQ Growth has long been committed to helping drive outsized growth and product adoption for businesses leveraging next-generation technology to improve the ways we work and live, from foundational infrastructure enablers to innovative AI applications. We are thrilled to partner with Arvind and the Glean team as they work to unlock the power of enterprise knowledge, harnessing AI to drive enterprise productivity and transform how employees work at organizations around the world.
Published:
February 27, 2024
