Arvind Jain, cofounder and CEO at Glean
One of the most aggravating things about working in an office is keeping track of all of the important documents. It feels as if you’re always looking for that signed contract. There’s always a frantic search to track down the number of paid time off and vacation days you have left. Of course, your children have a medical issue and human resources can’t be seen to find out what doctors are part of your health plan.
Arvind Jain sought out to remedy this problem. His goal was to offer a software-as-a-service solution to save hours of hunting for essential documents.
Jain spent more than 10 years at Google, going from one of the company’s first engineers when it was a privately held startup to becoming a distinguished engineer. In 2019, he founded Glean, an AI-powered workplace search engine designed to enhance productivity by helping employees navigate company apps efficiently. Now a $2.2 billion unicorn, it targets enterprise accounts from its inception, aiming to provide solutions for complex tech stacks and internal inefficiencies within large organizations.
Falling In Love With A Problem
In a wide-ranging interview with Jain, he shared his career journey leading up to building Glean.
At a prior startup that he founded, Rubrik, Jain noticed that employees—including himself—had a hard time finding and retrieving company information, especially as the organization grew rapidly. The hectic searches would take valuable time away from being productive.
“I believe that the heart of entrepreneurship is problem-solving. Four years after cofounding Rubrik in 2014, we had grown to over 1,000 employees, but productivity had stagnated, and the company’s output wasn’t growing commensurately with its scale,” Jain said. “From employee surveys, we discovered that employees were spending hours trying to piece together fragmented information across various places, like Google Docs, Slack, Jira, email, etc.”
He contended that leveraging artificial intelligence could help with this challenge and make it easier to get access to everything, ranging from employment contracts, health insurance, vacation schedules and other important documents.
Jain stated, “To solve this problem at Rubrik, I realized that scattered knowledge across the enterprise was an issue plaguing most organizations, but nobody had found a solution. So, I decided to build Glean.”
Founded by a team of former Google search engineers and industry veterans, Glean’s mission is to provide a solution to the lack of efficient workplace search tools.
It would offer a packaged solution with a unified workplace search experience, allowing employees to readily access their company’s collective knowledge from a single platform, regardless of where they are working.
How It Works
Similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Glean’s generative AI provides document summaries within seconds. It enables expeditious extractions of data without the annoyance of sorting through lengthy documents manually. The tool streamlines information retrieval for people, which allows them to work more efficiently and effectively.
Additionally, Glean’s chat feature leverages AI for workplace conversations and interactions. The tool provides personalized and relevant answers to business questions through interactive conversations. The search results are indexed in real time, enabling employees to always have access to the latest information.
According to Jain, Glean’s AI-powered search tools significantly boosted employee productivity at Rubrik. By providing smarter and more intuitive search experiences, it empowered employees to access and utilize organizational knowledge effectively.
The AI search engine allows employees to access their company’s collective knowledge from a single platform. It increases efficiency and productivity by supporting a centralized search solution across all organizational apps.
A key to both helping workers and continually advancing the product, Glean’s personalized results continually build the company’s knowledge base. As employees use the feature, it becomes more personalized. The technology makes suggestions for the information they need, based on what they’re working on, where they’re mentioned and what’s trending for their team, and directs experts who can help with any problems.
The fast-growing startup has more than 200 workers and announced last week a Series D round of over $200 million, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The Competition
This sector is hot and growing with a number of companies offering AI-powered solutions that provide advanced search functionalities, personalized results, relevant recommendations and improved user experiences across various internal platforms.
- Microsoft’s Azure AI Search uses AI technologies to enhance search capabilities within organizations.
- Amazon Kendra is powered by machine learning and aims to improve search efficiency and relevance for users.
- Coveo AI offers an AI-powered enterprise search solution that provides advanced search capabilities, relevant recommendations and personalization.
- Unleash is an AI-powered enterprise search tool designed to provide a unified search experience across all workplace environments, both cloud-based and on-premises, to improve productivity and information access for users.
- Google Cloud Search leverages Google’s search capabilities to help users find information within Google Workspace services, like Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Calendar, providing relevant answers and suggestions to assist users in their daily work.
Source: Forbes
