Glean, an enterprise AI search startup, has no trouble raising capital, but according to founder and CEO Arvind Jain, the company doesn’t actually need it.
“The company has not really needed capital, unlike other AI companies,” he told PitchBook in an interview Thursday at Web Summit Vancouver. “We started before the AI boom, so nobody was going to give us a billion dollars to spend. We had to fundamentally build a company as a real business that makes money.”
Over the last couple of years, AI startups—especially those building large language models—have been raking in incredible amounts of venture capital. The seldom-questioned justification has been that it’s very expensive to build.
Jain explained that much of Glean’s meteoric fundraising has been driven by a desire to strengthen the Glean image, rather than a need for capital.
The company raised $460 million in 2024 across two rounds, seven months apart, and saw its valuation double to $4.6 billion. Founded in 2019, Glean’s AI search engine can find information and documents across an organization and answer employees’ questions through a chatbot.
“We sell to the biggest enterprises in the world, and they need to see that they’re buying a product from somebody who’s going to last,” Jain said of his company’s accumulation of capital. “Sometimes it’s about understanding the competitive scenario and players, and needing to have lasting power. It’s like insurance.”
He also confirmed that Glean is not yet profitable but said it easily could be. “If we became profitable that means I should be fired because that means I am not investing back.”
Jain’s comments echo those of Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield when the workplace chat startup raised yet more money at an eye-popping valuation in 2016. Just as Slack was flying high during a bull market and a never-ending flow of venture dollars, Jain’s Glean is undoubtedly taking advantage of investors’ current exuberance when it comes to AI.
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