Glean AI: Redefining Enterprise Knowledge and Powering the Future of Work

The age of agentic AI is upon us. There are several ingredients that will determine the success of agentic AI, including but not limited to personalization, security, autonomy, reasoning and context. The bedrock for enterprise agentic AI to be successful though, is powering these agents with a permissioned, up-to-date and cross-organizational knowledge base. Glean’s agentic AI platform not only serves as that bedrock, but it has evolved to empower users to build, deploy, and orchestrate AI agents that automate complex, multi-step business workflows. That is why we are excited to announce our investment into Glean, a company that by virtue of solving the enterprise knowledge management challenges, has become a trusted partner to bring enterprises into the agentic AI era. 

Enterprise Search: A Decades-Old Challenge Finally Ripe for Disruption

For decades, the promise of efficient enterprise knowledge management has remained elusive,  as the promise of older solutions was thwarted by fragmented information across disparate systems, clunky interfaces, and a fundamental lack of context, leaving employees sifting through digital haystacks for critical needles of information. 

The core problem Glean addresses is deeply entrenched. Traditional enterprise search tools, designed for a pre-AI world, struggled to bridge vast data silos spanning hundreds of applications and cloud platforms and lacked the intelligence to understand context, differentiate permissions, or connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information. The explosion of unstructured data – from chat logs and emails to collaborative documents – further exacerbated these challenges. This inefficiency has been a significant drain on productivity, with employees spending as much as nine hours a week simply searching for internal documents. The shift to remote and hybrid work models has only intensified this pain, making the seamless flow of institutional knowledge more critical than ever.

Glean AI’s differentiation lies in its AI-native architecture, built from the ground up for the complexities of modern enterprise data. At its heart is a sophisticated knowledge graph, powered by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This innovative approach has data network effects and allows Glean to go beyond keyword matching, offering comprehensive, permissions-aware indexing, and continuous crawling across an organization’s entire digital footprint, which is also AI-cost conscious (e.g. think token costs to crawl for data). These capabilities enable it to draw meaningful, role-specific connections, providing contextual and highly relevant information or responses. 

Glean’s Work AI Platform: The Critical Infrastructure Layer for Enterprise AI

Beyond its foundational search-led assistant capabilities, Glean AI is strategically positioned to become the open, horizontal AI data platform that enterprises urgently need. As AI initiatives become a board-level mandate, businesses are actively seeking a unified layer upon which to build and manage their AI strategies. Glean’s platform, with its robust security, compliance, and governance features, serves as this critical backbone. It acts as a “Switzerland” of enterprise data, seamlessly integrating with various “systems of records” or operating ecosystems – be it Microsoft, Google, Databricks, Snowflake, Workday, or other SaaS applications. This broad connectivity, facilitated by over 100 connectors, allows Glean to serve as a trusted partner, empowering other software companies’ agents and allaying CIOs’ concerns about granting access to multiple vendors. These partnerships also demonstrate Glean’s capacity to power essential AI functionalities for other platforms, fostering a collaborative agent ecosystem that promotes interoperability and autonomous agent operations. This strategic positioning enables Glean to participate meaningfully in the burgeoning AI agent market, projected to exceed $50 billion by 2030.

Leadership Excellence: Critical in times of uncertainty 

The agentic era is fast evolving, needing steady leadership at its helm. Led by Arvind Jain, his unique background – being co-founder of Rubrik, which was at the center of data and security and a Distinguished Engineer at Google focusing on building search products – makes him uniquely qualified to tackle the intricacies of enterprise knowledge management and surfacing it for horizontal agentic AI. The broader leadership team further reinforces this expertise. CTO T.R. Vishwanath’s 16 years at Meta and Microsoft, including leading Facebook’s News Feed ranking engine, brings invaluable experience in managing large-scale data and user engagement. President of Product & Technology Tamar Yehoshua, formerly CPO for Slack and a VP in Google Search, contributes a wealth of knowledge in product development and user experience. CRO Marc Wendling, with his extensive sales leadership experience from Snowflake and SumoLogic, is transferring product velocity to value accrual for their enterprise customers. This collective expertise across product, data, security, and go-to-market strategies provides Glean with an unparalleled ability to execute its ambitious vision and navigate the competitive landscape.

The timing is opportune. Geodesic Capital’s investment in Glean is a belief in a category leader poised to revolutionize enterprise productivity. It represents a bet on a company that has the potential to become the essential knowledge-surfacing infrastructure for the AI-powered enterprise of the future.