Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Glean is reportedly in advanced talks to raise $250 million in funding.
The deal would value the company at $4.5 billion, double the valuation it received in another capital raising six months ago, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Thursday (August 8), citing unnamed sources.
The details of the deal have not yet been finalized and could still change, according to the report.
Glean did not immediately respond to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
The company’s subscription revenue has reached $55 million on an annualized basis and could reach $100 million by year-end, according to the report.
Glean’s product – a search software that helps employees find information across the company – falls into the category of AI-powered productivity apps, which investors believe could be more lucrative in the short term than AI-powered consumer-facing apps, the report said.
During its last funding round in February, Glean raised more than $200 million from investors including Citigroup, Capital One Ventures, Databricks and Sequoia, valuing the company at $2.2 billion.
“Our investors share our belief that Glean is the right solution, built by the right team at exactly the right time,” the company said in a Feb. 26 blog post announcing the capital raise.
Glean explained in its blog post that the company aims to become the platform that companies turn to when they need an AI work assistant, while also offering tools to “create customized, generative AI experiences based on enterprise knowledge.”
The integration of artificial intelligence-based enterprise search capabilities represents an incremental improvement and a turning point that is changing the way companies access, analyze and activate their accumulated data assets, PYMNTS reported in March.
Eddie Zhou, head of AI at Glean, told PYMNTS in an interview published March 21, “The ability of generative AI models to be coherent and fluid in synthesizing material is an incremental improvement in their outputs. Using these models as an interface to help companies decide how to perform a set of tasks – that’s a capability that hasn’t been present in AI models in the past.”
