• Glean has launched tools for building and managing digital agents that carry out tasks on their own.
• The company faces competition from Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox in enterprise search.
• Glean's new features include agent libraries and real-time internet search.

Glean is going all in on digital agents.

The enterprise software unicorn on Wednesday unveiled a new suite of tools for businesses to build, deploy, and manage digital agents. The company continues rolling out new products in the face of competition from Google, Snowflake, Dropbox, and others.

Glean's service lets employees query all their enterprise data. It tunnels through the customer's various systems and applications at unbelievable speeds and summarizes the findings.

The company has been testing new reasoning capabilities for several months with a select group of customers. It's now releasing some of those features widely.

Employees can describe a task using plain language, and Glean parses the prompt into smaller tasks and takes steps to achieve the desired outcome. For example, an employee can tell the Glean chatbot, "prep for my one-on-one with Tina." Glean blasts through their shared emails, Slack messages, Google Docs, Figma files, and other sources to suss out what topics should be addressed and then writes an agenda for the meeting.

The employee can save this "agent," basically a set of instructions, to their workspace and recall it at any time. They can also configure the agent's settings to run ahead of every one-on-one with Tina and drop a link to the agenda in the calendar event.

Emrecan Dogan, Glean's head of product, said the company has just begun to deliver on the promise of what agents can really do.

"Your agents are working for you while you are asleep," Dogan told Business Insider on a call earlier in the week.

Founded by a team of former Google search engineers, Glean began its life as "Google search for businesses." The rub is that Google has since entered that space. It's made numerous upgrades to the Google Cloud platform, enabling developers to build search into their applications. The Information reported in November that Google is preparing to launch a new enterprise search product to compete directly with Glean's.

The new agent environment is part of Glean's strategy to offer more powerful software features to customers as it faces mounting competition. The company said last week that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the 2024 fiscal year.

On the call with Business Insider, Dogan demonstrated other use cases that leverage Glean's latest release. He prompted the chatbot to prepare a table comparing Glean to Candian rival Coveo for a sales call. In seconds, it combed internal data sources and searched the web to prepare the table, all while showing on-screen the steps it took in real time.

The new release also includes an agent library designed to help workers get started with pre-built agents. Employees can share custom agents with their teams so workers don't waste precious time if, Dogan said, "somebody spent the brain cycles to come up with a better agent."

• Glean hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year after doubling its customer base.
• Enterprise search is a competitive field, with players like Google and OpenAI.
• Glean plans to expand into new markets and verticals to sustain growth.

Glean, a company that makes search chatbots and agents for businesses, said it achieved an annual recurring revenue of $100 million in its last fiscal year. That's up from hitting $50 million ARR, or the yearly value of last month's revenue, in 2024.

A company that began as "Google search for the workplace" has more than doubled its customer base in the past year alone and was most recently valued at $4.6 billion in a funding round that included Altimeter, Kleiner Perkins, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It has become a daily use product for hundreds of customers, including Databricks, Duolingo, and Plaid.

Glean is part of a select group of AI startups seeing fast-growing revenue and strong investor interest. Anysphere, the 3-year-old startup behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, recently was valued at $2.5 billion and hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, The New York Times reported last month. The AI legal startup Harvey is raising a new round at a $3 billion valuation and was bringing in $50 million in annual recurring revenue as of December, The Information said.

Enterprise search has become a key battleground for a wide variety of businesses, such as Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox. OpenAI last year bought an enterprise search startup that could help ChatGPT compete more directly with Glean.

Glean's business has grown as organizations grasp the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to provide quick productivity gains, Arvind Jain, Glean's founder and CEO, said. The company often sells to customers who are just getting their feet wet and buying their first pure AI software, Jain added.

He said they say, "'Can I just have an assistant like ChatGPT but something that is knowledgeable about my company, my employees, everything?' That's what Glean is."

Employees today rely on various systems and applications to do their work. These systems produce large amounts of data that's often siloed, which makes it challenging for employees to find information quickly. Glean's service allows workers to search across these disparate data sources and create and summarize content.

Glean says it avoids the issue of hallucinations through a technique called retrieval-augmented generation. This framework gathers relevant information from external knowledge sources and feeds it to a large language model to write a response. In the past year, Glean has baked in agentic reasoning, which describes the ability of artificial intelligence systems to break up queries into steps and execute a plan to train "agents" for specific tasks.

Room to grow

Glean has projected annual recurring revenue of $200 million to $250 million by the end of 2025, a person with direct knowledge of the business' financials said.

Jain didn't comment on the specific numbers but said there were several areas where Glean was targeting its next pockets of growth. It's reaching into new markets, such as Japan and Europe, where Jain said it already had some customers.

The company is hiring several account executives in those regions and a partner manager in Japan to work with software resellers and consultancies that help customers implement Glean's technology.

Glean will also need to expand beyond its base of technology companies to sustain its growth. Jain said Glean had customers in verticals such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and financial services and would continue to push into new areas.

Perplexity acquired a small Seattle-based startup called Carbon which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources, the companies announced on Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan says this will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and other enterprise applications sometime in early 2025. Carbon specializes in […]

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