Report: AI Startup Glean in Talks to Raise $250 Million

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Glean is reportedly in advanced discussions to raise $250 million in financing.

The deal would value the company at $4.5 billion, a figure that is double the valuation it achieved in another fundraise six months ago, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday (Aug. 8), citing unnamed sources.

The details of the deal have not been finalized, and they could change, according to the report.

Reached for comment by PYMNTS, Glean spokesperson Kate Miller said in an email: “To ensure we’re building the strongest business we can, we’re regularly in conversation with investors, but we have not solidified any plans to raise a new round since our Series D which was announced earlier this year. We’re encouraged by the momentum we’re seeing with customers, and continue to focus on building the leading work AI platform.”

The company’s subscription revenue has reached $55 million on an annualized basis and could reach $100 million by the end of the year, per the report.

Glean’s product — search software that helps employees find information from across their organizations — is in the category of AI-powered productivity apps that investors believe could be more lucrative in the short term than AI-powered consumer-facing apps, the report said.

During its previous funding round, which was held in February, Glean raised more than $200 million from investors that include Citigroup, Capital One Ventures, Databricks and Sequoia, valuing the firm at $2.2 billion.

“Our investors join us in our belief that Glean is the right solution, built by the right team, at exactly the right time,” the company said in a Feb. 26 blog post announcing that fundraise.

Glean said in the blog post that its goal is to become the platform companies turn to when they need an AI work assistant, while also offering tools to “build custom generative AI experiences grounded in company knowledge.”

Integrating enterprise search capabilities that use AI represents an incremental improvement as well as a game-changer, transforming how companies can access, analyze and activate their accumulated data repositories, PYMNTS reported in March.

Eddie Zhou, head of AI at Glean, told PYMNTS in an interview posted on March 21: “The ability of generative AI models to be coherent and fluent when synthesizing material is a step function improvement in their output. Using these models as an interface to help businesses decide how to execute a set of tasks — that is a capability that was not present in AI models in the past.”