The battle for enterprise AI is heating up. Microsoft is bundling Copilot into Workplace. Google is pushing Gemini into Workspace. OpenAI and Anthropic are promoting on to enterprises. Each SaaS vendor now ships an AI assistant.
Within the scramble for the interface, Glean is betting on one thing much less seen: changing into the intelligence layer beneath it.
Seven years in the past, Glean got down to be the Google for enterprise — an AI-powered search device designed to index and search throughout an organization’s SaaS device library, from Slack to Jira, Google Drive to Salesforce. In the present day, the corporate’s technique has shifted from constructing a greater enterprise chatbot to changing into the connective tissue between fashions and enterprise methods.
“The layer we constructed initially – a superb search product – required us to deeply perceive folks and the way they work and what their preferences are,” Jain advised TechCrunch on final week’s episode of Fairness, which we recorded at Internet Summit Qatar. “All of that’s now changing into foundational by way of constructing prime quality brokers.”
He says that whereas massive language fashions are highly effective, they’re additionally generic.
“The AI fashions themselves don’t actually perceive something about your small business,” Jain mentioned. “They don’t know who the completely different persons are, they don’t know what sort of work you do, what sort of merchandise you construct. So you must join the reasoning and generative energy of the fashions with the context inside your organization.”
Glean’s pitch is that it already maps that context and might sit between the mannequin and the enterprise information.
The Glean Assistant is commonly the entry level for purchasers — a well-recognized chat interface powered by a mixture of main proprietary (ie, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and open-source fashions, grounded within the firm’s inside information. However what retains prospects, Jain argues, is all the things beneath it.
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First is mannequin entry. Moderately than forcing corporations to decide to a single LLM supplier, Glean acts because the abstraction layer, permitting enterprises to change between or mix fashions as capabilities evolve. That’s why Jain says he doesn’t see OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google as competitors, however relatively as companions.
“Our product will get higher as a result of we’re in a position to leverage the innovation that they’re making available in the market,” Jain mentioned.
Second are the connectors. Glean integrates deeply with methods like Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and Google Drive to map how info flows throughout them and allow brokers to behave inside these instruments.
And third, and maybe most necessary, is governance.
“You’ll want to construct a permissions-aware governance layer and retrieval layer that is ready to deliver the precise info, however understanding who’s asking that query in order that it filters the knowledge based mostly on their entry rights,” Jain mentioned.
In massive organizations, that layer will be the distinction between piloting AI options and deploying them at scale. Enterprises can’t merely load all their inside information right into a mannequin and create a wrapper to type out the options later, says Jain.
Additionally important is making certain the fashions don’t hallucinate. Jain says its system verifies mannequin outputs in opposition to supply paperwork, generates line-by-line citations, and ensures that responses respect present entry rights.
The query is whether or not that center layer survives as platform giants push deeper into the stack. Microsoft and Google already management a lot of the enterprise workflow floor space, and so they’re hungry for extra. If Copilot or Gemini can entry the identical inside methods with the identical permissions, does a standalone intelligence layer nonetheless matter?
Jain argues enterprises don’t need to be locked right into a single mannequin or productiveness suite and would relatively go for a impartial infrastructure layer relatively than a vertically built-in assistant.
Traders have purchased into that thesis. Glean raised a $150 million Collection F in June 2025, practically doubling its valuation to $7.2 billion. Not like the frontier AI labs, Glean doesn’t want huge compute budgets.
“We’ve got a really wholesome, fast-growing enterprise,” Jain mentioned.
