Glean, a company often described as Google for the enterprise, said its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has reached $300 million. This is a threefold increase from the $100 million reached just 15 months ago.
While many AI startups are growing at breakneck speeds, Glean’s progress is particularly noteworthy. After years of being essentially the only player in the category, the seven-year-old startup is accelerating its growth as tech giants enter the enterprise AI search market with competing products.
“For the first four or five years of our existence, we had no competition,” Glean CEO Arvind Jain told TechCrunch. “Given how important search is to making AI work in the enterprise, every company in the world wants to be in this space.”
Some of the tech heavyweights building tools similar to Glean include Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and Atlassian.
Jain argues that while there is value in being a leader in your field, delivering a better product is equally important.
According to Jain, what makes Glean better than its competitors is that its AI tools have a deep understanding of customers’ business needs. Glean’s AI achieves this knowledge (a concept expressed in the new popular term “context graph”) by connecting to and learning from a company’s internal software systems.
Jain argues that Glean’s context graph can also help enterprises reduce AI computing costs.
“Connecting AI to Glean provides all the information it needs to do its job, so AI will consume significantly fewer tokens compared to applying it directly to the system,” Jain said. He added that this is because with Glean, the AI does less work.
At a time when many companies are wasting their AI budgets, these token cost savings have become a major selling point for companies.
“One of the reasons our customers really like Glean is the fact that it allows them to significantly reduce their AI costs,” he said.
The company, last valued at $7.2 billion when it raised a $150 million Series F in June, offers a variety of pricing structures to customers including Databricks, Reddit, Pinterest and Samsung.
According to Jain, Glean offers both a consumption-based model, where customers pay based on usage, and a hybrid model that combines a flat monthly fee for active users with a separate usage fee for model consumption.
Glean certainly isn’t the first company to do this, but it’s worth pointing out that the company’s $300 million milestone can’t be fully explained by traditional ARR because its consumption model by definition doesn’t have a strictly recurring component.
Because the pure consumption pricing model relies on fluctuating user activity rather than predictable subscription renewals, some of Glean’s toplines are more accurately described as annual revenue run rates.
Glean did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This post will be updated when we hear back from the company.
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