Glean, an enterprise search engine startup cofounded by Google and Facebook veterans, emerges from stealth with $55M in funding across two rounds
When Arvind Jain left his cushy tech job to cofound cloud data management company Rubrik, he ran into a familiar problem: search. Tweets: @kleinerperkins , @wowitsmrinal , @mamoonha , and @tonygentilcore Tweets: Kleiner Perkins / @kleinerperkins : Glean is changing the way companies get work done—finding exactly what you need, right when you need it, wherever you are. We're thrilled to partner with @jainarvind and the @gleanwork team on their mission to make workplace knowledge more accessible. https://www.forbes.com/... Mrinal Mohit / @wowitsmrinal : Super excited to share what I've been working on for the past year, alongside an incredible, rapidly growing team! We're hiring awesome engineers across the board (especially ML/NLP) to build the world's best work assistant at @gleanwork! https://www.forbes.com/... Mamoon Hamid / @mamoonha : Really excited for folks to finally try Glean! It solves the problem of “finding stuff at work” Enterprise search has (surprisingly) been an unsolved problem - @jainarvind & the @gleanwork team have been hard at work building something that really works. https://www.forbes.com/... Tony Gentilcore / @tonygentilcore : I'm beyond excited to finally share what our brilliant team @gleanwork has been building for over two years. So humbled and fortunate to be a part of this. https://www.forbes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Glean's stealth exit is the starting point of an unusually steep arc: Arvind Jain, who hit the same search problem while building Rubrik-style enterprise tooling, left a Google engineering role to fix workplace search with ex-Facebook and ex-Google colleagues, and Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid backed the $55M across two rounds before the product was public. What came after validates the bet — a $1B Series C led by Sequoia in 2022, then a $260M round at $4.6B in September 2024, and finally a $150M Series F at $7.2B in June 2025.
First-order effects
- Kleiner Perkins converts a pre-product bet into a stake in what became one of enterprise AI's most-valued private startups, with Jain's team funded to build unified search across every app a company runs.
Second-order effects
- The funding cadence — $1B in 2022 to $7.2B by 2025 — forces every enterprise software vendor whose apps Glean indexes to decide whether workplace search is a feature they own or a layer they rent from someone like Glean.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise search consolidates around AI-native answer engines that sit across all workplace apps, with valuation set by annualized revenue growth rather than seats — a structural split between the apps where data lives and the layer that answers questions about it.
The trend: Workplace search is being rebuilt as an AI answer layer spanning every enterprise app, and Glean's valuation climb from stealth to $7.2B marks it as a defining data point in that shift.