AI-powered search startup Glean said Tuesday it has raised $260 million in a funding round that values the tech company at $4.6 billion — more than double its last reported valuation. The Palo Alto, California-based firm, ranked No. 43 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised more than $600 million to date from more than 20 investors.
Glean competes with a herd of well-financed generative AI startups and tech giants, attempting to compete with Microsoft Copilot and chatbot Amazon Q. It also aims to disrupt a field of cognitive search tool providers such as Perplexity, Coveo, Sinequa and LucidWork.
Glean’s Series E round, led by Altimeter and DST Global, includes Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, all new investors in the company.
Existing investors in the round include Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.
Founder and CEO Arvind Jain started Glean in 2019 with other former Google engineers as an enterprise search engine. The company soon transitioned to generative AI. Jain has described Glean as Google and ChatGPT for businesses. It offers conversational AI to sort through internal data, retrieve information, and present quick answers. Jain is also a founder of Rubrik, which had a successful IPO in April.
“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,” Jain said in a blog post announcing the latest round.
Global enterprise spending on generative AI is projected to rocket from $16 billion in 2023 to $143 billion in 2027 and account for 28% of AI expenditures, according to tech research and advisory firm IDC.
In a breakout year for AI funding, startups in that industry saw five times the level of investment as the previous year. As many as 36 generative AI startups have become unicorns, according to CB Insights, as valuations surged and corporate investors Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google led the march.
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