Glean
Company History
Glean History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones
Founded 2019 in Palo Alto, California
When was Glean founded?
Glean was founded in 2019 in Palo Alto, California by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore, making it 7 years old.
- Founded
- 2019
- Founding place
- Palo Alto, California
- Founders
- Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore
- Headquarters today
- Palo Alto, California, United States
- Milestones documented
- 6 (2019–2026)
- Current CEO
- Arvind Jain
- Acquisitions
- 1
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2019 | Glean founded in Palo Alto by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony |
| 2021 | $40 million Series B led by General Catalyst (March); Glean exits stealth and launches |
| 2022 | $100 Million Series C |
| 2024 | Series D of more than $200 million at $2.2 billion (February); $260 million Series E at |
| 2025 | Passes $100 million ARR (early 2025); agent platform generally available (May); $150 |
| 2026 | $300 Million ARR |
- Where was Glean founded?
- Glean was founded in Palo Alto, California in 2019.
- Who founded Glean?
- Glean was founded by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore.
- When did Glean start?
- Glean was founded in 2019.
- How old is Glean?
- Glean is 7 years old as of 2026.
Founding Story
Arvind Jain spent more than a decade at Google working on Search, Maps and YouTube before co-founding data security company Rubrik in 2014. As Rubrik grew, he saw employees struggle to find internal information scattered across dozens of SaaS tools. He left to start Glean in 2019 with T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore, raising early funding from Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed. Glean came out of stealth in September 2021.
Founders
Arvind Jain
Arvind Jain co-founded Glean in 2019. Drawing on his experience at Google (where he helped build Google Search) and as a co-founder of Rubrik, he realized enterprise employees were wasting massive amounts of time simply trying to find internal documents scattered across dozens of disjointed SaaS apps. He founded Glean to build 'Google for the enterprise.' Arvind Jain was born in 1974.
T.R. Vishwanath
T.R. Vishwanath co-founded Glean in 2019 alongside his former Google colleague Arvind Jain. He was instrumental in building the incredibly complex backend architecture required to securely index and search data across highly disparate enterprise platforms (like Jira, Slack, and Google Drive) without violating strict corporate permissions. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Piyush Prahladka
Piyush Prahladka co-founded Glean in 2019. Bringing deep expertise in search algorithms and machine learning from his time at Google, he helped design the core intelligence engine that allows Glean to understand exactly what a specific employee is searching for based on their role and past behavior. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Tony Gentilcore
Tony Gentilcore co-founded Glean in 2019. With extensive experience optimizing web performance (he was a core contributor to the Google Chrome browser), he ensured the Glean platform was incredibly fast and responsive, creating a seamless search experience that mimicked the speed of consumer web search. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Key Milestones
Glean founded in Palo Alto by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony
Glean founded in Palo Alto by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore; $15 million Series A co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed.
Source: en.wikipedia.org$40 million Series B led by General Catalyst (March); Glean exits stealth and launches
$40 million Series B led by General Catalyst (March); Glean exits stealth and launches its search product (September).
Source: en.wikipedia.org$100 Million Series C
$100 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation (May).
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSeries D of more than $200 million at $2.2 billion (February); $260 million Series E at
Series D of more than $200 million at $2.2 billion (February); $260 million Series E at $4.6 billion co-led by Altimeter and DST Global (September).
Source: en.wikipedia.orgPasses $100 million ARR (early 2025); agent platform generally available (May); $150
Passes $100 million ARR (early 2025); agent platform generally available (May); $150 million Series F at $7.2 billion led by Wellington Management (June); $200 million ARR (December).
Source: glean.com$300 Million ARR
Named No. 41 on the CNBC Disruptor 50 (May); reaches $300 million ARR (May).
Source: techcrunch.comMajor Acquisitions
Aryn
2026Agentic document intelligence platform.
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Glean Company History FAQ
What are the major milestones in the company history of Glean since 2019?
Key milestones include founding in 2019, emergence from stealth with Series B funding in 2021, achieving unicorn status with Series C in 2022, launching Glean Assistant (generative AI) in 2023, introducing Glean Apps (custom AI agents) in 2024, and reaching a $7.2 billion valuation with its Series F in June 2025.
How did Glean operate during its two-year stealth development phase (2019-2021)?
During its stealth phase, Glean's engineering team worked closely with early design partner companies (such as Confluent and Samsara), testing real-world search relevance on millions of enterprise documents and perfecting real-time IAM permission synchronization.
What was the significance of Glean's public launch in September 2021?
Glean emerged from stealth in September 2021 announcing $55 million in funding led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed, demonstrating a modern workplace search interface that immediately generated widespread acclaim among enterprise IT leaders.
How did the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 catalyze enterprise demand for Glean?
When ChatGPT debuted, global enterprises wanted generative AI assistants but could not use public tools due to security, copyright, and lack of internal company knowledge. Glean was uniquely positioned with its pre-built enterprise knowledge graph to deliver safe, grounded enterprise LLM assistants.
How has Glean expanded its global operational presence across multiple continents?
Glean expanded from its Palo Alto headquarters to establish major commercial and engineering hubs in New York City, London (to serve expanding EMEA demand), and Bengaluru, India, supporting enterprise customers operating across global time zones.
What industry awards and analyst recognitions has Glean received?
Glean has been consistently named to the Forbes AI 50 list, CNBC Disruptor 50, Enterprise Tech 30, and recognized by Gartner and Forrester as a leading pioneer in cognitive search, enterprise knowledge discovery, and workplace generative AI.
How did Glean scale its infrastructure to support enterprises with over 100,000 employees?
Glean re-architected its vector indexing pipelines and distributed search shards to support petabytes of corporate data, enabling sub-second search latency and real-time permission sync across organizations with over 100,000 knowledge workers.
What is Glean's ultimate mission for the future of work and human productivity?
Glean's mission is to make people and organizations significantly more productive and fulfilled at work by organizing enterprise knowledge, delivering instant clarity, and empowering every knowledge worker with an intelligent AI partner.
How did Glean start?
Glean was founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain. Jain was previously a Distinguished Engineer at Google and a co-founder of Rubrik. At Rubrik, he realized employees were wasting massive amounts of time trying to find documents scattered across Google Drive, Slack, and Jira. He founded Glean to build a universal, AI-powered search engine strictly for internal company data.
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