Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another positive impact that happened during the pandemic. On the sales side, organizations became comfortable buying products over Zoom calls. You do everything on Zoom. Large deals were closing purely on Zoom calls.

Arvind Jain: Yes. In our first year, we had one sales person. Then we hired the second one. We were able to get a lot of customers signed up. Zoom is interesting. It’s very efficient. You don’t spend a day to travel to a customer.

Sramana Mitra: Client management got really efficient.

Arvind Jain: We continue it even now. There are more conversations happening over Zoom. Even after the pandemic, a lot of companies are still distributed.

Sramana Mitra: I think it’s become a permanent culture change. People understand the efficiency of a Zoom meeting and don’t bother driving to meetings. Where is your development team?

Arvind Jain: Most are in Palo Alto. We also have a team in Bangalore that we started last year. That’s growing rapidly.

Sramana Mitra: During the pandemic, your team was in Palo Alto but working from home?

Arvind Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2021?

Arvind Jain: The big milestone for us was when we came out and announced our company to the world. We were still operating under the radar in stealth mode. We came out of stealth. We authorized our second round of funding.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Arvind Jain: $40 million. At that point, it started to feel more like a real company. People know you. We invested heavily in sales and marketing as opposed to just building the product. We more than doubled our customers and tripled our revenue.

Sramana Mitra: In that tripling of that revenue, how much of it is new customers? How much of it is existing customers becoming bigger?

Arvind Jain: It’s both. In some sense, we are in a category-defining business. When we sell our product, it’s not that we replace some other product or tap into a budget, we are actually solving a problem that nobody was buying a solution for. That was a big part of our go-to-market motion. If somebody buys a new product in a category for the first time, they don’t know how much to pay. You have to convince them that you’re going to add value. We had customers try it for some time.

Sramana Mitra: But by this time, there are productivity tools for remote work or hybrid work. That is probably that budget that is starting to gravitate towards you.

Arvind Jain: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2022?

Arvind Jain: The business continues to grow. We raised our Series C in 2022. This was led by Sequoia. The company raised a little over a hundred million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: You’re officially a unicorn. Why do you need so much money?

Arvind Jain: Because search is a very difficult problem to solve. It requires a lot of R&D. Imagine Google. They have 25,000 engineers

Sramana Mitra: Yes, but Google has not used 25,000 engineers. Google has hired tons of engineers, got them terribly bored as they sit there doing nothing. That is not a good comparison at all.

Arvind Jain: Regardless, search is a complicated piece of technology.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain
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