Sequoia leads investment in solution to help employees combat knowledge fragmentation and SaaS sprawl at work

Glean announced that it has raised a $100M series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1B valuation, just over half a year after emerging from stealth.

Glean delivers a powerful, unified search experience across all of a company’s apps to help employees find exactly what they need and discover the things they should know. Using its understanding of who individuals are, what they’re working on, and who they’re working with, to instantly deliver highly personalized results, Glean helps employees save 2-3 hours per week. Instead of wasting time digging for the information they need, employees can focus on the jobs they were hired to do.

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This comes at a time when company knowledge is fragmented across constantly proliferating SaaS apps, workplaces are increasingly decentralized and distributed, and employees are struggling to find the information needed to do their work.

“The workplace has fundamentally changed,” said Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean. “SaaS sprawl has accelerated and a global pandemic made remote and hybrid work environments into a new normal. This presents huge challenges for companies to ensure that their employees can find answers to their questions, and can stay connected not only to company knowledge, but also to each other. Glean puts a company’s knowledge at its employees’ fingertips. It’s every employee’s personal assistant, helping them ‘glean’ exactly the insights they need to do their best work.”

“As a global company that’s scaling faster than ever, we have to make sure our team members have the information they need to do their most important work and help our customers solve their biggest challenges with data,” said Joel Thomas, Solution Architecture and Field Engineering at Databricks, a Glean customer. “Glean streamlines this experience and helps ensure everyone on the team can find the right information in a timely manner. Moreover, Glean was able to understand and self-learn our company specific domain and acronyms without any manual setup. This was key in providing accurate and personalized search results.”

Employers Desperate For A Solution

In today’s increasingly complex workplace, employers are desperate to prevent knowledge loss and employee burnout. A recent study revealed that employed Americans on average spend 25% of their work week looking for the documents, information, or people they need to do their jobs. This is so draining that 43% say they’d consider leaving their jobs if their employer didn’t provide them with an easy/efficient way to access the information and people they need to get their jobs done.

Due to the recent SaaS explosion, company knowledge now lives in more places than ever. Remote and hybrid work compound the issue: informal knowledge sharing channels don’t exist, employees lack visibility into what’s happening across the company, and social isolation makes employees feel less connected to their work and organization. This drag on employee experience is fueling the “Great Resignation.”

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Customers Quickly Embrace Glean

Since launching in September 2021, Glean has seen incredible customer engagement. For the first time, knowledge workers not only have the ability to search for exactly what they need, but also discover knowledge and people who can help them move faster. Glean’s ability to connect with all of a company’s applications in under two hours (as opposed to months of implementation that was previously the industry standard) is also driving rapid customer adoption.

“Glean has cracked the code on organizing knowledge work and making it accessible to all employees,” said Sonya Huang, partner at Sequoia. “Employees at today’s top companies have quickly come to love Glean’s intuitive and delightful experience, evidenced by the fact that 40-60% of customers’ employees are monthly active on Glean, and have high engagement ratios of 45% DAU/MAU. Arvind and team are defining a new paradigm for how we work, and we’re thrilled to partner with them on this journey.”