As a late-stage VC fund, Fabrica Ventures has been cautious about investing in AI application startups, as most are still in the deployment or scaling phase. However, after two years of the AI big wave (in 2024, AI startups captured 1/3 of all VC funding), we are finally spotting a few “established” AI application startups — who have achieved widespread industry adoption and reached stability in their tenure in operation.
Among them, Glean stands out. According to CB Insights’ Mosaic ranking, Glean holds the highest score among AI application startups (956/1000). And Glean is now part of the Fabrica Ventures portfolio.
The typical US enterprise operates with over 1,000 APIs, yet only 29% actively talk with one another and share data. The average office worker relies on 11 different applications daily, spending 13 minutes searching for information before asking for help. In total, employees spend ~20% of their workweek just to find the right documents, data, or colleagues they need to do their jobs — resulting in $1T in lost productivity annually.
In addition to information fragmentation, the rise of distributed work environments has made it necessary for companies to provide employees with efficient tools for self-serving, onboarding, and finding information.
That is where Glean comes in. Glean is a productivity startup that has developed an intelligent enterprise search assistant by indexing and understanding the context of documents from multiple platforms using 100+ APIs.
In summary, Glean is transforming the way knowledge workers search for and consume information. By integrating with many knowledge databases within an enterprise, Glean builds a contextual knowledge graph to understand what information is critical, where it is stored, and who at the company has any possible additional context on that info. At its core, Glean is an AI-powered enterprise search and knowledge management platform designed to make information discovery seamless and efficient.
In just two years Glean achieved revenues of $100M and its customer base already includes major enterprises like Reddit, Instacart, Deutsche Telekom, and Databricks.
Backed by the crème de la crème of VCs — including General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Coatue, ICONIQ, IVP — Glean has secured $625M in funding and swiftly reached a $4.6B valuation.
Conclusion
Glean was founded by Arvind Jain who also co-founded Rubrik.
During a survey at Rubrik, he observed that finding information was the “single biggest employee environment issue”. Jain realized that no product existed in the market that was solving the problem of knowledge fragmentation within enterprises.
If history is any indication, lightning just might strike twice in the same place.