Glean Technologies Inc., the developer of a conversational search platform for enterprises, has raised more than $200 million in a late-stage round that values it at $2.2 billion.

The company announced the Series D round today. Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners were the lead investors. The round also included contributions from nearly a dozen other backers, including Databricks Ventures, Workday Ventures and Capital One Ventures.

Glean is led by Chief Executive Officer Arvind Jain, who was previously a member of Rubrik Inc.’s founding team and a distinguished engineer at Google LLC. The company provides a search platform with a ChatGPT-like conversational interface. Enterprises use it to help their workers more quickly navigate internal data troves.

According to Glean, its platform includes more than 100 prebuilt connectors that allow it to retrieve data from popular business applications. The platform not only indexes the information a company keeps in those applications but also takes into account the associated access permissions. For example, if a worker doesn’t have access to a certain file, Glean won’t incorporate information from the file into the AI responses generated for that worker.

The platform also customizes search results in other ways. Glean says its AI algorithms adapt what information appears in query responses based on factors such as workers’ job descriptions and the project they’re currently working on. If Glean receives a question to which there’s no ready answer in its knowledge base, it can find users who may possess the necessary information.

The platform also functions as a writing and coding assistant. Help desk teams, for example, can use Glean to generate support ticket responses. It likewise promises to speed up software development tasks such as finding programming best practices and information about recent code changes.

Companies with more advanced requirements can customize the platform’s AI models. Glean allows business users to build chatbots optimized for specific tasks such as answering common customer support questions. Developers, in turn, can configure the platform to perform actions in third-party applications based on user prompts.

“Glean Assistant users average 14 queries per day (compared to Google’s average of 3-4), and Glean users save an average of 2-3 hours per employee per week,” Jain detailed in a blog post today.

Strong customer demand has helped Glean nearly quadruple its sales over the past year. CNBC reported that the company’s annual recurring revenue stood at $39 million at the end of January, up from $10 million 12 months earlier. Well-funded graphic design startup Canva Inc. and Sony Electronics Inc. are among the new customers that have signed up in that time frame. 

Glean is launching a market expansion initiative to maintain its recent sales momentum. The company is reportedly extending its focus beyond the tech industry to organizations in other sectors including the financial services, retail and manufacturing segments. Glean plans to hire as many as hundreds of new employees this year to support the effort.

Photo: Glean