Glean, a company often described as the Google for business, said it reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), three times the $100 million milestone it reached just 15 months ago.
While many AI startups are growing at a rapid pace, Glean’s progress is particularly notable. After years of being essentially the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with rival products.
“The first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given the importance of search to making AI work in the enterprise, every company in the world wants to be in this space.”
Tech heavyweights creating tools similar to Glean include Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Atlassian.
Jain maintains that there is value in being a pioneer in the space, but it is also equally important to offer a better product.
What Glean does better than its competition, according to Jain, comes down to the deep understanding its AI tools have of customers’ business needs. Glean AI achieves this knowledge – a concept captured by the new and popular term “context graph”: connecting and learning from companies’ internal software systems.
Jain says Glean’s context graph also helps companies reduce AI computing costs.
“If you connect your AI to Glean, it gives it all the information it needs to do its job, and that results in the AI consuming far fewer tokens compared to if you release the AI directly into your systems,” Jain said. This is because with Glean, the AI ends up doing fewer operations, he added.
At a time when many companies are burning through their AI budgets, those token cost savings have become a major selling point for the company.
“One of the things you know our customers really like about Glean is the fact that we can significantly reduce their AI bill,” he said.
The company, which was last valued at $7.2 billion when it raised a $150 million Series F last June, offers several pricing structures to its clients, including Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest and Samsung.
According to Jain, Glean offers a consumption-based model, where customers pay as they go, and a hybrid model that combines a fixed monthly fee for active users with separate usage fees for model consumption.
Glean is definitely not the first company to do this, but it’s worth noting that the company’s $300 million milestone can’t be fully described as traditional ARR, because a consumption model, by definition, doesn’t have a strictly recurring component.
Pure consumer pricing models rely on fluctuating user activity rather than predictable subscription renewals, so a portion of Glean’s revenue is more accurately described as a Annualized revenue run rate.
Glean did not immediately respond to a request for comment; This post will be updated if the company responds.
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