- Glean hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year after doubling its customer base.
- Enterprise search is a competitive field, with players like Google and OpenAI.
- Glean plans to expand into new markets and verticals to sustain growth.
Glean, a company that makes search chatbots and agents for businesses, said it achieved an annual recurring revenue of $100 million in its last fiscal year. That's up from hitting $50 million ARR, or the yearly value of last month's revenue, in 2024.
A company that began as "Google search for the workplace" has more than doubled its customer base in the past year alone and was most recently valued at $4.6 billion in a funding round that included Altimeter, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It has become a daily use product for hundreds of customers, including Databricks, Duolingo, and Plaid.
Glean is part of a select group of AI startups seeing fast-growing revenue and strong investor interest. Anysphere, the 3-year-old startup behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, recently was valued at $2.5 billion and hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, The New York Times reported last month. The AI legal startup Harvey is raising a new round at a $3 billion valuation and was bringing in $50 million in annual recurring revenue as of December, The Information said.
Enterprise search has become a key battleground for a wide variety of businesses, such as Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox. OpenAI last year bought an enterprise search startup that could help ChatGPT compete more directly with Glean.
Glean's business has grown as organizations grasp the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to provide quick productivity gains, Arvind Jain, Glean's founder and CEO, said. The company often sells to customers who are just getting their feet wet and buying their first pure AI software, Jain added.
He said they say, "'Can I just have an assistant like ChatGPT but something that is knowledgeable about my company, my employees, everything?' That's what Glean is."
Employees today rely on various systems and applications to do their work. These systems produce large amounts of data that's often siloed, which makes it challenging for employees to find information quickly. Glean's service allows workers to search across these disparate data sources and create and summarize content.
Glean says it avoids the issue of hallucinations through a technique called retrieval-augmented generation. This framework gathers relevant information from external knowledge sources and feeds it to a large language model to write a response. In the past year, Glean has baked in agentic reasoning, which describes the ability of artificial intelligence systems to break up queries into steps and execute a plan to train "agents" for specific tasks.
Room to grow
Glean has projected annual recurring revenue of $200 million to $250 million by the end of 2025, a person with direct knowledge of the business' financials said.
Jain didn't comment on the specific numbers but said there were several areas where Glean was targeting its next pockets of growth. It's reaching into new markets, such as Japan and Europe, where Jain said it already had some customers.
The company is hiring several account executives in those regions and a partner manager in Japan to work with software resellers and consultancies that help customers implement Glean's technology.
Glean will also need to expand beyond its base of technology companies to sustain its growth. Jain said Glean had customers in verticals such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and financial services and would continue to push into new areas.