Glean: Putting AI to work, at work.

At Altimeter, we have been studying the AI landscape across the stack, from semiconductors to applications, and asking ourselves: Where will value accrue? As we dug deeper into the ecosystem, we have come to believe that Glean is on a path to becoming not just an enterprise search tool, but the enterprise AI platform. Today, we are excited to announce Altimeter’s partnership with Glean as a co-lead for their Series E fundraise.

The problem

The vast majority of company knowledge is scattered in silos of unstructured data. It is not just documents, but also code, screenshots, emails, presentations, diagrams, and more. Consequently, knowledge workers today spend more time than ever looking for answers spread across more apps than ever, which hurts organization productivity and competitive edge. Generative AI promises to bring more efficiency to the workplace, but operationalizing it at scale while leveraging an organization’s proprietary datasets securely is a significant technical challenge. 

Glean’s solution

CEO Arvind Jain and the founding team worked on Google Search in the early days, making them particularly suited to solve one of the biggest challenges in operationalizing enterprise generative AI: seamless search across heterogeneous enterprise datasets. Glean delivers a turnkey enterprise search and generative AI solution with enterprise-grade security, role-based access control logic, and fully referenceable source documents, all on petabytes of data with constant real-time changes. Some Glean customers connect up to 50 disparate applications across email, messaging, calendar, document storage, ticketing systems, code repositories, CRM tools, project management tools, and more¹. Glean combines its powerful search with generative AI capabilities to produce answers that are precisely tailored to the user’s query with the proper enterprise context, driving improved employee productivity. Glean is leading the charge in enterprise AI, trusted to deliver the latest and greatest advancements— from data retrieval to analysis, summarization, content generation, and task automation— and continuously evolving to meet future needs.

Glean Product Overview:

Source: Company Materials

Customers report strong engagement and penetration… 

Engagement and penetration are two important metrics we look at for how much utility enterprises get from software products. Glean stands out in both usage frequency (engagement) and diversity of use cases (penetration). At Glean, 70-80% of monthly users engage on a weekly basis. This is just shy of essential enterprise tools like calendar (80%), email (95%), and browsers (95%)² (full analysis here). This high engagement is not limited to a small subsect of employees within a customer organization— we observe it across a wide range of personas in engineering, sales, support, business development, operations, IT, marketing, finance, and more. In some of the most mature customer deployments, over 80% of employees are monthly active users. In contrast, other AI solutions tend to benefit a small subset of enterprise employees (e.g. coding AI for junior developers or image generation for marketing teams). 

…delivering tangible ROI with customer love

The ROI of AI investments is a hot topic of debate. Customers are quantifying the ROI on Glean spend in terms of productivity gains, dollars saved, and employee satisfaction. One CIO noted that they procured Glean at a time when they conducted layoffs because Glean helped them consolidate spend¹. This demonstrates that the ROI makes sense even in tough times. Not only are employees spending time on Glean, but they also love it. Our customer survey shows that Glean has a 47% net promoter score, compared to 43% for Slack and 33% for Microsoft products. Another CIO shared that employees would revolt if he took Glean away¹. 

The path forward

We believe we are still in the early innings of the generative AI revolution, and there is much more innovation to come. Glean has the potential to be the platform that brings AI innovation to the enterprise—in search, chat, agents, and beyond. In its next generation of products focused on effective prompting, Glean is driving AI-centric behavior among users, a critical step in advancing AI at work. 

We are excited to support Arvind and the Glean team as they redefine how work happens in the enterprise.

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Disclosures

Reflects Altimeter's views and beliefs unless otherwise noted. There is no assurance that Altimeter will continue to see similar levels or types of investment opportunities, execute on any particular investment opportunity in the future, or that any such investment would be profitable. Third party views are not necessarily representative of Altimeter and content has not been reviewed for completeness or accuracy

No Updates and No Warranties: Unless otherwise specifically indicated in a particular instance, everything in this Document speaks only as of the date of this document.  This Document is necessarily incomplete and necessarily reflects only a small, non-exclusive, and out-of-context sample of Altimeter’s opinions, assumptions, projections, processes, valuation metrics, considerations, and available information (including information provided by third-parties).  While Altimeter currently believes that this Document is accurate in isolation, Altimeter makes no express or implied warranty as to this Document current or future accuracy, relevance, or completeness, and Altimeter cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions appearing in this Document.  This Document subject matter (including each forward-looking statement) is constantly evolving, and is constantly under scrutiny, re-evaluation, and revision by Altimeter, and always remains subject to change, modification, termination, supplementation, or reversal at any time in Altimeter’s sole and absolute discretion or without Altimeter’s knowledge.  Altimeter has no obligation to update, supplement, or revise this Document, or to otherwise notify you, if or when (a) any information in this Document (including each forward-looking statement) changes or reverses or if any information (including any forward-looking statement) proves to be inaccurate; (b) new, changed, or different events, circumstances, developments, or other factors materially change or reverse the conclusions, opinions, assumptions, forward-looking statements, or other information contained in this Document; or (c) Altimeter modifies, revokes, terminates, supplements, reverses, or otherwise changes any Altimeter opinions, conclusions, assumptions, projections, personnel, or investment strategies, restrictions, parameters, procedures, or policies, or any other information.

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Sources

1. Glean Customer Survey. There is no assurance that this data is an accurate representation of all Glean customers. 

2. External Sources:  Certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources. Although Altimeter believes the information from such sources to be reliable, Altimeter makes no representation as to its accuracy and completeness.