Making workplace knowledge accessible

Finding the right information you need at work, when you need it, should be fast and easy. With the endless number of applications each person uses to get their job done, and the amount of data and documents that get generated as a result, this isn’t always the case. This exponential rise in “knowledge” has led to an increase in the time needed to find knowledge that already exists. In other words, “searching for stuff” at work is fairly broken.

As early investors in what used to be called “Consumerization of the Enterprise” through investments like Box, Yammer and Slack – we got to experience companies that brought common consumer behaviors like file sharing and messaging into the workplace. More recently, as early investors in the “Future of Work” we’ve experienced companies like Figma, Loom and Coda fully embrace and enable us to function in the remote and distributed modern workplace. However, one constant remains: “searching for stuff” at work is broken even though it has worked well in our personal lives for two decades now, thanks to Google.

Enter Arvind Jain.

We first met Arvind in late 2018 thanks to Shishir Mehrotra, another KP founder. We were immediately compelled by Arvind’s vision for a universal search product for the workplace. We felt like the time was now and Arvind was the right founder to go after this unsolved problem. Arvind had identified a number of ex-colleagues from Google who could help him realize this vision. The team quickly came together and took up incubation space at Kleiner Perkins’ office where the team built the product until the beginning of the pandemic.

Their mission was simple: help people find all the answers to workplace questions faster, with less frustration and wasted time. What has resulted goes well beyond the realm of search. Glean is an incredibly delightful and intuitive experience that enables employees to find information and people regardless of where they reside. What they have developed will break down the silos that slow progress, and create more positive and productive work experiences.

As organizations become more distributed and knowledge becomes more fragmented, having an intuitive work assistant like Glean is not only a nice to have, but a critical piece of employee productivity. Glean doesn’t just search across every single one of your workplace apps and knowledge bases (Slack, Google, Figma, Dropbox, Coda, etc.) it also understands language and context, and recognizes relationships between people to offer personalized assistance. It intelligently surfaces the most popular information at your company to help you discover what your team knows, and stay on the same page.

The future of work is being built in real time, and the rise of work-from-anywhere has demanded that companies adopt a digital-first approach to enable employee success. As a happy Glean customer, we know first-hand that this product will change the way companies get work done in a big way. We’re excited to partner with the Glean team on their journey to bring people the knowledge they need to make a difference in the world.

— Mamoon