Glean targets enterprise AI infrastructure in land grab

The race to dominate enterprise AI is accelerating. Microsoft is embedding Copilot into Office, Google is integrating Gemini into Workspace, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are selling directly to corporations. Meanwhile, nearly every SaaS vendor now includes an AI assistant.

Amid the rush to own the user interface, Glean is pursuing a less visible strategy: becoming the intelligence layer underneath.

Seven years ago, Glean started as Google for the workplace — an AI-powered search engine built to index and retrieve information across a company’s entire SaaS ecosystem, from Slack and Jira to Google Drive and Salesforce. Today, the company has pivoted from building a better enterprise chatbot to creating the connective tissue between AI models and business systems.

“The initial layer we built — a solid search product — forced us to deeply understand people, their workflows, and their preferences,” Jain told TechCrunch on last week’s episode of Equity, recorded at Web Summit Qatar. “All of that now serves as the foundation for building high-quality agents.”

He notes that while large language models are powerful, they remain generic by nature.

“The AI models themselves don’t understand anything about your business,” Jain said. “They don’t know who the key people are, what type of work you do, or what products you build. You have to connect the reasoning and generative power of the models with the context inside your company.”

Glean’s value proposition is that it already maps that context and can sit between the model and enterprise data.

The Glean Assistant often serves as the initial touchpoint for customers — a familiar chat interface powered by a mix of leading proprietary models (like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude) and open-source alternatives, all grounded in the company’s internal data. But what keeps customers onboard, Jain argues, is everything happening beneath the surface.

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First is model access. Instead of forcing companies to commit to a single LLM provider, Glean serves as an abstraction layer, letting enterprises switch between or combine models as capabilities evolve. That’s why Jain says he views OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google not as competitors, but as partners.

“Our product improves because we can leverage the innovation they bring to the market,” Jain said.

Second are the connectors. Glean integrates deeply with systems like Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and Google Drive to map how information flows across them and enable agents to take action within those tools.

Third — and perhaps most critical — is governance.

“You need to build a permissions-aware governance and retrieval layer that can bring the right information while knowing who’s asking the question, so it filters results based on their access rights,” Jain said.

In large organizations, this layer can mean the difference between piloting AI solutions and deploying them at scale. Enterprises can’t simply load all internal data into a model and add a wrapper to sort out solutions later, Jain says.

Equally important is preventing hallucinations. Jain explains that the system verifies model outputs against source documents, generates line-by-line citations, and ensures responses respect existing access permissions.

The big question is whether this middle layer will survive as platform giants push deeper into the stack. Microsoft and Google already control much of the enterprise workflow surface area, and both are hungry for more. If Copilot or Gemini can access the same internal systems with identical permissions, does a standalone intelligence layer still matter?

Jain argues that enterprises want to avoid being locked into a single model or productivity suite and would rather choose a neutral infrastructure layer over a vertically integrated assistant.

Investors have bought into this vision. Glean raised a $150 million Series F in June 2025, nearly doubling its valuation to $7.2 billion. Unlike frontier AI labs, Glean doesn’t require massive compute budgets.

“We have a very healthy, fast-growing business,” Jain said.