The enterprise AI land grab is on, Glean is building the layer beneath the interface

Glean is positioning itself as the intelligence layer beneath enterprise artificial intelligence interfaces rather than focusing solely on the user-facing chatbot experience. The company started seven years ago to build an AI-powered search tool for indexing content across internal SaaS tools such as Slack, Jira, Google Drive and Salesforce. Its approach has shifted toward serving as the connective tissue between models and enterprise systems through model access, connectors and governance capabilities. Chief Executive Arvind Jain said the early search product developed a deep understanding of people, their work and preferences that now underpins high-quality agents. He noted that large language models remain generic and lack knowledge of specific business details including personnel, work types and products built by the company. Glean connects the reasoning and generative capabilities of models with internal company context, Jain said. The Glean Assistant offers a familiar chat interface powered by a mix of proprietary models including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude as well as open source options, all grounded in the organization's data. What retains customers is the layer underneath, which includes the ability to use multiple models without commitment to one provider, integrations with workplace systems that enable agents to act inside them and a permissions-aware governance layer that filters information according to access rights, according to Jain. The system verifies outputs against source documents and generates line-by-line citations. Glean raised $150 million in a Series F round in June 2025, nearly doubling its valuation to $7.2 billion. Jain said the company has a very healthy, fast-growing business and that enterprises favor a neutral infrastructure layer to avoid lock-in with a single model or suite.