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Glean

Founders

Who Founded Glean?

Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka, Tony Gentilcore · Founded 2019 · HQ today: Palo Alto, California, United States

Who founded Glean?

Glean was founded by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka, Tony Gentilcore in 2019. It is now led by Arvind Jain.

Founders
Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka, Tony Gentilcore
Founded
2019
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California, United States
Number of founders
4
Current CEO
Arvind Jain (since 2019)
Where was Glean founded?
Glean was founded in Palo Alto, California in 2019.
When was Glean founded?
Glean was founded in 2019.
Who started Glean?
Glean was founded by Arvind Jain, T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka and Tony Gentilcore.
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.

What each Glean founder did

FounderRole at foundingContribution
Arvind JainFounder & CEO—
T.R. VishwanathCo-founder—
Piyush PrahladkaCo-founder—
Tony GentilcoreCo-founder—

Arvind Jain

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Google distinguished engineer and Rubrik co-founder.

Role at Glean

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

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Facebook and Google software engineer.

Role at Glean

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

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Google engineer.

Role at Glean

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

Co-founder 2019

Background

Former Google engineer and Chrome developer.

Role at Glean

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).

Glean: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Arvind Jain

Founder & CEO

2019 – Present

Led Glean from launch to $300 million ARR by May 2026.

Keep researching Glean

Who Founded Glean? FAQ

Who are the four co-founders of Glean and what are their professional backgrounds?

Glean was founded in 2019 by Arvind Jain (Distinguished Engineer at Google, co-founder of Rubrik), T.R. Vishwanath (former Facebook and Microsoft software architect), Tony Gentilcore (former Google Chrome founding team engineer), and Piyush Prahladka (former Google Search ranking engineer).

How did the co-founders' Google search experience shape Glean's core architecture?

Having spent decades building web-scale search ranking algorithms, page-rank systems, and distributed indexing pipelines at Google, the founding team possessed deep domain expertise in applying natural language processing and relevance algorithms to noisy unstructured text.

What technical problem did the founders spend their first two years solving?

The founders spent 2019 to 2021 building the world's most sophisticated enterprise connector and permission graph, solving the large engineering challenge of synchronizing document access permissions across dozens of SaaS APIs in real time.

Where did the founders build the initial prototypes of Glean?

The founders began prototyping Glean in Palo Alto, California, testing their early search algorithms on their own multi-app workflows and piloting with close Silicon Valley engineering connections before emerging from stealth in September 2021.

What role did T.R. Vishwanath play in architecting Glean's backend infrastructure?

T.R. Vishwanath brought deep expertise in distributed storage systems and high-throughput networking from his tenures at Microsoft and Facebook, architecting Glean's secure multi-tenant data indexing and low-latency query retrieval pipeline.

How did Tony Gentilcore's browser engineering expertise influence Glean's user experience?

As a founding engineer on the Google Chrome team, Tony Gentilcore focused on making Glean's search interface unusually fast, intuitive, and smoothly embedded within web browser extensions and modern desktop workflows.

What contributions did Piyush Prahladka make to Glean's semantic ranking algorithms?

Piyush Prahladka applied his deep experience in Google Search machine learning to design Glean's personalized relevance engine, which weights search results based on author authority, team collaboration patterns, and document recency.

Why did the founders choose the name 'Glean' for their enterprise startup?

The founders selected the name 'Glean' because the word means to extract information or discover knowledge gradually and carefully from diverse sources, reflecting the company's mission to help employees gather insights from fragmented company tools.

Who founded Glean?

It was founded by Arvind Jain along with T.R. Vishwanath, Piyush Prahladka, and Tony Gentilcore. The founding team consists almost entirely of highly elite former engineers from Google and Facebook, giving them the massive technical expertise required to index petabytes of scattered corporate data.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.