- Glean is a $7.2 billion enterprise AI work assistant with $200 million in ARR, powering over 100 million agent actions annually for customers like Booking.com and TIME.
- Arvind Jain grew up in Jaipur, India, studied computer science at IIT Delhi, then earned a master’s degree at the University of Washington before joining Microsoft.
- Jain spent over a decade at Google as a Distinguished Engineer — a title held by fewer than a few dozen people at the company — leading teams on Search, Maps, and YouTube.
- Before founding Glean in 2019, Jain co-founded Rubrik, the data security company that went public in 2024 at a $5.6 billion valuation.
$200 Million in ARR and an AI Platform That Knows Where Everything Lives
Glean is an enterprise AI work assistant that connects to every tool a company uses — Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, Salesforce, email — and lets employees find answers instantly. Instead of searching ten different apps, workers ask Glean. The platform serves thousands of enterprises globally, with employees averaging five queries per day and an industry-leading 40% weekly active engagement rate. In February 2026, the company crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, doubling from $100 million in just nine months.
Behind it is Arvind Jain, a 50-something engineer from Jaipur who spent his career building search infrastructure at the highest levels of Silicon Valley — and who saw, from the inside, that the hardest place to find information was not the open internet but the workplace.
A Kid in Jaipur Who Got a PC Before Most of India Had Seen One
Jain grew up in Jaipur, Rajasthan, in a family with no particular connection to technology. When he was about ten, his elder brother brought home a PC — a rare object in India at the time, when most families had never seen a computer, let alone owned one. The machine captivated him. He taught himself to program, spending hours writing code while his classmates played cricket.
The obsession carried him to IIT Delhi, one of the most competitive engineering schools in the world, where he earned a degree in computer science. From there he moved to the United States in 1996, enrolling in a master’s program at the University of Washington. He landed his first job at Microsoft, then joined Akamai, the content delivery network, as an early engineer.
Employee 1,000 at Google: Building Search From the Inside
In late 2003, Jain joined Google as roughly its 1,000th employee — back when the company was still private and small enough that Larry Page and Sergey Brin personally interviewed most engineering hires. He would stay for more than a decade.
”It was incredibly hard to find anything inside Google as well when it came to our work.”
Google promoted him to Distinguished Engineer, a designation reserved for the top 1% of its technical staff. He led teams across Search, Maps, YouTube, and Google Fiber. The title put him in the same tier as Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat — infrastructure legends whose work underpins the entire Google ecosystem. But even inside the company that invented modern search, Jain noticed something that gnawed at him: finding internal information was a mess.
The Paradox That Planted the Seed for Glean
The irony was sharp. Google had built the most powerful search engine on Earth, yet its own employees struggled to locate internal documents, project specs, and institutional knowledge. The open web was organized. The workplace was chaos.
Jain left Google in 2014 to co-found Rubrik with Bipul Sinha, Soham Mazumdar, and Arvind Nithrakashyap. The cloud data security company scaled fast, raised $553 million, and went public via direct listing in April 2024 at a $5.6 billion valuation. It was a genuine success story. But the problem Jain had spotted at Google kept following him.
”A survey at Rubrik revealed that work was not progressing because employees did not know where to look to find information.”
At Rubrik, an internal employee survey confirmed what he had long suspected: productivity stalled because people simply could not find what they needed. Company knowledge was scattered across Slack channels, Google Drive folders, Confluence wikis, Jira tickets, and dozens of other tools that rarely talked to each other.
Three Trends That Made Enterprise Search Finally Solvable
In early 2019, Jain bet that three converging trends would crack the problem that had frustrated him for 15 years. First, the shift to SaaS meant a company’s knowledge was no longer locked in private data centers — it lived in cloud applications with accessible APIs. Second, core search technology components had become open-source. Third, the Transformer model — the architecture behind modern large language models — offered a step-function improvement in understanding information conceptually, not just matching keywords.
He assembled a founding team of former Google search engineers and launched Glean. Sequoia Capital led the early funding. The company’s first product was a search bar that sat on top of every enterprise tool, indexing everything and delivering answers in seconds. It worked because Jain had spent his career building exactly this kind of infrastructure — just at a different scale.
From $1 Billion Valuation to $7.2 Billion in Three Years
Glean hit $100 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation in May 2022. Then the generative AI wave hit, and suddenly every enterprise on Earth wanted what Glean was building. The company raised $200 million in a Series D at $2.2 billion in February 2024, followed by a $260 million Series E at $4.6 billion in September 2024. By June 2025, Glean closed a $150 million Series F led by Wellington Management at a $7.2 billion valuation — tripling its worth in barely a year.
The product evolved in lockstep. Glean launched Glean Agents in early 2025, an environment enabling organizations to deploy AI agents at scale. The platform now powers over 100 million agent actions annually. Customers include some of the most recognizable brands in finance, retail, and manufacturing. The company nearly tripled its $1 million-plus customer segment in 2025.
The AI Companion That Never Forgets
Jain’s vision for Glean extends far beyond search. He sees a future where every knowledge worker has a digital companion that knows their goals, their meetings, their documents — and steps in to help before they even ask.
”The majority of work will be done by AI companions or assistants. They will have access to all company data and knowledge, with context from past conversations, and they won’t forget anything.”
In March 2026, Glean acquired Aryn, a data infrastructure startup, signaling its push deeper into the foundational layer of enterprise AI. The company is building what Jain calls “the layer beneath the interface” — the knowledge graph that connects every piece of information inside a company and makes it actionable. With $765 million raised, $200 million in ARR, and a product that thousands of enterprises now rely on daily, Glean is no longer a search tool. It is the operating system for how companies think.
