• Former Google engineer Arvind Jain builds a search engine for businesses at his startup Glean.
• Now it brings in long -time Slack exec AJ Tennant to run the sales team and its success as it grows.
• Business search has been an unresolved issue for a long time, say Glean executives and investors.

The general headache for company employees comes when they cannot find the right information at the right time to finish their work. Arvind Jain, a former Google engineer, is trying to solve that problem with his new startup Glean, which is building a search engine for businesses.

In the modern way of working, an individual company can use dozens or even hundreds of different apps to communicate, collaborate, and get things done. While this gives employees more choice in the apps they use at work, it also leads to more challenges: specifically, searching through all those different apps to find the information you need.

Glean recently achieved a milestone when it announced in May that it had reached a $ 1 billion valuation in its most recent round of funding, led by legendary venture firm Sequoia Capital.

Now as the company looks to grow, it is bringing in longtime Slack exec AJ Tennant to run its sales and success team. Tenant is

Slack

The first was a sales leader and developed the ability to sell to large companies, so he has the expertise Glean needs to expand its customer base, Jain told Insider.

“We’re usually willing to measure the company in a meaningful way,” Jain said of Tennant. “And we really want to bring someone who has seen a journey like this – developing an iconic product that becomes like a household name.”

Ultimately, if Glean is able to achieve its goals and grow accordingly, the possibilities are endless, Tennant told Insider.

“This is what we’re all looking for,” Tennant said. “Having a way to more easily find information within your business and, and create a graph of knowledge that seems impossible to do in the past decade or two.”

Glean comes from Jain’s experiences at Google

Jain has spent over a decade at Google leading various teams in developing its Search, Maps, and YouTube products. After leaving Google, he founded Rubrik, a cloud data management startup, where he began to see the need for an enterprise search product, he said.

Rubrik grew rapidly, and four years later had 1,000 employees. Soon, the leadership found out, that its rapid growth led to problems: People struggled to do their jobs, becoming less productive as it grew. Through company surveys, Jain and his team found that as the company grew, it became more difficult for individual employees to find the information or resources they needed to be effective.

When Jain and his team searched for a search product to help solve it, nothing was available. Some companies say they can build a custom search engine for them, but nothing is simple and quick to implement. He sought advice from other founders, and he heard that they were also struggling with the same issue with their companies. That’s what prompted Jain to leave Rubrik to start Glean in early 2020.

“It’s a big productivity issue. It affects every single person working in every single company in the world, but the problem is completely unresolved,” Jain said. “And of course I’m a search engineer, and it’s a search problem. So I’m really excited to go and solve it as well.”

Jain has spent the last two years building a team, recruiting many of his former Google colleagues, and trying to build a solid customer base. Many well -known medium -sized cloud companies now use Glean, including Okta, Databricks, Grammarly, Samsara, Confluent, and Outreach.

Building momentum as a startup

Pick up

Now with Tennant, Jain hopes to continue growing the business and make Glean an iconic productivity company like Zoom or Slack.

As he moves into this new role, Tennant said his top priority is to grow the sales team with a focus on the enterprise’s large customers, and thinking of new ways to get Glean into the market. That includes partnering with consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture that do a lot of work in the knowledge management space.

Glean also has a unique pricing model today, where it allows customers to make a free pilot of the product before purchasing it. The model is similar to freemium model companies like Slack,

Zoom

, and Dropbox, with the difference that the Glean pilot has to go through the CIO’s office. Tennant said he will also focus on making that pilot program more efficient and automated.

He also thinks that because Glean is able to host on the company’s own servers or in the cloud, it will be easier to sign up with customers outside the technology industry. A big challenge with Slack, for example, is getting customers who are still moving to the cloud to use the chat app because it has become another place where information is stored and not connected to the rest of the company.

For those in the software industry, Glean is getting a significant and lingering irritation for some sort of Google for the workplace, says Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia. Jain’s experience at Google, and Glean’s early momentum, convinced his team at Sequoia to invest in its recent round, he said.

“Google is the organizing force behind how we navigate the world as consumers. And that’s just not in the enterprise,” Huang told Insider. “We have more and more SaaS tools, people are working remotely. Knowledge work is scattered across all these different systems. It’s very hard to find the information you need to be productive.”

Have a tip? Contact this reporter by email at [email protected] or Signal at 925-364-4258. (Pre-pitch by email only, please.)