"Industry Observer" is a column we established specifically for cutting-edge technologies such as AI, XR, Metaverse, and Web3. It primarily focuses on sharing the stories of emerging enterprises and entrepreneurs in these fields. Glean, a leader in enterprise AI, recently completed its Series E funding round, raising over $260 million, valuing the company at $4.6 billion. With this significant funding, what is the company's announced "next-generation prompt"? Here's our 29th issue, enjoy!

In modern society, numerous companies such as Wealthsimple, SUPER, webflow, duolingo, CONFLUENT, upside, and CONTINO have faced challenges related to information overload and knowledge silos.

Information overload refers to the overwhelming amount of emails, documents, database information, and project management tool data that employees need to process daily. This abundance of unstructured information makes it difficult for them to efficiently access the most relevant content.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon of knowledge silos occurs when information and knowledge are scattered across multiple departments or tools, lacking a unified channel for easy access by employees. This hinders enterprises from fully utilizing their existing internal knowledge.

Glean was born to address this exact challenge.

01. Quick Overview of the Project in 1 Minute

1. Project Name: Glean

2. Establishment Date: 2019

3. Product Introduction:

The AI assistant and enterprise search platform, Workplace Search, connects to internal data sources, helping employees find information and answer questions.

4. Founder Team:

Arvind Jain: Co-founder of Rubrik, one of the fastest-growing companies in cloud data management, and a former Google employee leading teams in search, maps, and YouTube for over a decade;

Tony Gentilcore: Worked at Google for over a decade, modernizing web search interfaces and leading Chrome's Speed Team;

TR Vishwanath: Currently an adjunct professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering's Silicon Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin, and former dean of IIT;

Piyush Prahladka: Attended IIT Bombay.

5. Funding History:

March 1, 2019: Completed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners;

March 31, 2021: Completed a $40 million Series B funding round led by General Catalyst;

May 18, 2022: Completed a $100 million Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital;

February 27, 2024: Completed a $203.2 million Series D funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners;

September 10, 2024: Completed a $260 million Series E funding round led by Altimeter and DST Global.

Glean, an innovative company dedicated to bringing AI into enterprise workflows, completed a Series E funding round of over $260 million in September 2024, valuing the company at $4.6 billion.

Glean's rapid growth and high valuation reflect its leadership position in the enterprise AI space and the market's strong recognition of its technology.

The company's original aspiration was to create an AI-driven search system that could connect all an enterprise's internal data, which it has achieved through over 100 SaaS connectors.

Glean had already raised over $200 million in its Series D funding round in February 2024, valuing the company at $2.2 billion. Just six months later, the company's valuation doubled, showcasing its robust growth momentum. This funding round was co-led by Altimeter and DST Global, with new investors including Craft Ventures and Sapphire Ventures.

Glean's clientele includes renowned companies such as Reddit, Instacart, Pinterest, Duolingo, Databricks, and global leaders in telecommunications, banking, retail, semiconductors, electronics, and manufacturing.

Glean's vision is to make AI an integral part of everyone's work, enhancing creativity, productivity, and operational efficiency through easy-to-use tools. Its mission is to democratize AI technology, enabling users to find answers, generate content, and automate tasks without becoming prompt engineering experts.

The company's latest products leverage advanced search and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technologies to provide comprehensive, secure, private, permission-controlled, and traceable answers. These technologies empower Glean to deliver robust, secure, and trustworthy AI services to enterprise users.

Glean has emerged as a leader in enterprise AI solutions, renowned for its user-friendly, efficient, and secure products. Its success stems from a deep understanding of data, powerful search technology, and a unique enterprise-focused positioning. Moving forward, Glean will continue to aid enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.

Glean's Work AI platform is an intelligent system that connects all an enterprise's data, facilitating the rapid and secure integration of AI into workflows.

Leveraging advanced search and RAG technologies, the platform delivers highly personalized answers while ensuring their security, privacy, permission awareness, and full traceability back to internal source documents.

Its core functionalities include:

Search and Understand Information: Glean enables users to search for information, documents, and personnel, explore insights, research and discover, and assist new hires in quickly integrating into new roles and projects.

Create and Summarize Content: Users can create content, updates, and deliverables, summarize documents, discussions, and meetings, and analyze for insights and answers.

Automate Work: Glean supports automated responses to communications, streamlines repetitive tasks and workflows, and coordinates departmental processes.

Additionally, Glean introduces next-generation prompt technologies to ensure that AI is accessible to users of all skill levels, unhindered by the complexity of prompt engineering. These prompt features include:

Prompt Builder: Create, edit, test, save, and publish prompts using natural language;

Advanced Multi-Step Prompts: Automate complex tasks and workflows;

Prompt Sharing: Share prompts with team members to foster learning and adoption;

Prompt Library: Explore and discover new AI use cases.

04. Embedded Solutions

Glean has also introduced embedded solutions for Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, enhancing customer service efficiency.

These integrations place Glean directly within customers' default support workspaces, summarizing tickets, listing recommended next steps, displaying relevant documents and tickets, identifying experts, and composing customer responses, enabling teams to respond to customers quickly and accurately.

Glean's customer feedback highlights significant improvements in work efficiency, time savings, and quality. Users report that Glean's AI capabilities enable smarter prompt engineering, leading to better answers and automation.

05. Glean × Duolingo

Since its launch in 2012, the Duolingo app has rapidly emerged as a leading global language learning platform. The company is steadfast in its mission to develop world-class educational resources and make them accessible worldwide.

To achieve this, Duolingo's global team collaborates to transform language learning into a fun, efficient, and free experience, empowering learners everywhere to embark on their language exploration journey.

However, prior to Glean's introduction, Duolingo faced significant barriers to information sharing and collaboration among teams.

Company knowledge was fragmented across multiple systems like Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, and Zendesk, making it challenging for employees to access critical information, impacting efficiency and team morale. Annual survey data further corroborated these challenges.

To address this, Duolingo attempted to integrate information through Metasearch, an internally developed search aggregator. However, Metasearch lacked essential filtering and ranking capabilities, requiring significant time and effort to develop in-house.

Despite Metasearch, employees still struggled to find information efficiently, wasting valuable time and resources on repetitive tasks and inefficient searches.

As Duolingo grew and data volumes surged, the company urgently needed a more efficient and practical solution for knowledge management to alleviate employee stress and enhance overall efficiency.

Notably, Glean Chat, with its distinctive conversational interface, emerged as a key driver of productivity gains. Leveraging Glean's robust knowledge model, Glean Chat provides a more convenient way to retrieve personalized and highly relevant answers, significantly boosting information retrieval efficiency and accuracy.

Art Chaidarun, Duolingo's Chief Software Engineer, highly praises Glean Chat, considering it one of Glean's most underestimated yet potent features.

He notes, "Just as many people now consult ChatGPT before Google, Glean Chat can sometimes provide accurate answers faster than traditional search engines in certain situations."

"Employees' time is valuable," emphasizes Art Chaidarun. "By optimizing document accessibility, we can effectively save time, especially in avoiding redundant work and leveraging existing company knowledge. Glean significantly accelerates the search for critical insights, fostering communication and collaboration among teams."

"Now, employees prefer using Glean Chat to summarize documents, plan roadmaps, and quickly obtain answers that once required multiple queries. This shift simplifies knowledge sharing, reduces unnecessary duplication, and enhances our overall efficiency."

The collaboration between Glean and Duolingo showcases the immense potential of AI in enterprise knowledge management. This successful partnership not only highlights the benefits of AI for internal management efficiency but also foreshadows a future where more enterprises will leverage AI to drive innovation and development.