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AI-Powered Search Startup Glean Doubles Valuation in New Funding Round Led by Altimeter – NBC New York

Posted on by darion

  • AI-powered search startup Glean said Tuesday it has raised $260 million in a Series E funding round, valuing the tech company at $4.6 billion — more than double its last reported valuation.
  • The funding round is led by Altimeter and DST Global, and investors include Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 – all new investors in the company.
  • Glean is competing with a group of well-funded AI startups and tech giants, taking on Microsoft Copilot while also aiming to disrupt the cognitive search engine vendor space like Perplexity.

AI-powered search startup Glean said Tuesday it has raised $260 million in a funding round that values ​​the tech company at $4.6 billion — more than double its last reported valuation. The Palo Alto, California-based company, ranked 43rd on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has raised more than $600 million from more than 20 investors to date.

Glean is competing with a herd of well-funded generative AI startups and tech giants, trying to compete with Microsoft Copilot and Amazon’s Q chatbot. It also aims to disrupt the field of cognitive search tool providers like Perplexity, Coveo, Sinequa, and LucidWork.

Glean’s Series E funding round, led by Altimeter and DST Global, includes Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, all new investors in the company.

Current investors in this round include: Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

Founder and CEO Arvind Jain founded Glean in 2019 with other former Google engineers as an enterprise search engine. The company soon pivoted to generative AI. Jain described Glean as Google and ChatGPT for businesses. It offers conversational AI to sort through internal data, pull information and provide quick answers. Jain is also the founder of Rubrik, which had a successful IPO in April.

“Companies today are in the midst of an AI transformation—one that promises to be as big or bigger than the internet, mobile, cloud, and other major technology transformations of the last century,” Jain said in a blog post announcing the latest round.

According to research and consulting firm IDC, global enterprise spending on generative AI is forecast to grow from $16 billion in 2023 to $143 billion in 2027, accounting for 28% of AI spending.

In a watershed year for AI funding, AI startups saw five times the level of investment from the previous year. According to CB Insights, 36 generative AI startups became unicorns as valuations soared, with corporate investors Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google leading the charge.

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