Glean pivots to AI middleware to own the enterprise intelligence layer

Glean is betting its multi-billion dollar future on the belief that the AI wars won't be won by the smartest chatbot, but by the most connected plumbing. The enterprise search darling recently reached a 200 million dollar annual recurring revenue run rate, doubling its top line in just nine months. CEO Arvind Jain revealed on the TechCrunch Equity podcast that the company is executing a high-stakes pivot from a consumer-facing "Google for Work" to a horizontal middleware layer that powers the entire enterprise AI stack.

The move comes as Glean’s valuation surged to 7.2 billion dollars following a 150 million dollar Series F led by Wellington Management. While the company initially found success as an AI-powered search engine, Jain argues that the "land grab" for the enterprise AI layer is now about context and governance rather than just retrieval. By positioning itself as middleware, Glean aims to sit beneath rivals like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Einstein, feeding them the specific, permissions-aware data they lack.

"We serve as we act as a middleware platform behind the scenes and bring the right information, the right data, to all those verticalized AI experiences that you’re going to be building," Jain stated during the Equity interview. This strategy turns potential competitors into distribution partners. Instead of fighting for a separate tab in an employee's browser, Glean is becoming the invisible connective tissue that informs every other AI agent in the building.

The financial logic is grounded in efficiency. Customers using the platform have reported a 40 percent reduction in ticket resolution time for customer service teams, a metric that has helped Glean maintain its hyper-growth trajectory despite the crowded market. Furthermore, the platform is already processing more than 100 million agent actions annually, a figure the company expects to grow tenfold by the end of the year.

This pivot is a calculated escape from the "wrapper" trap. While many startups are struggling to justify their existence on top of large language models, Glean’s middleware approach leverages its deep integrations into over 100 SaaS applications. Jain’s background as a former Google search engineer and Rubrik co-founder is evident in this infrastructure-first mindset. He isn't trying to build the next LLM; he's building the governance and permission-aware retrieval layer that makes those models safe for the Fortune 500.

As enterprise budgets shift from "experimental AI" to "operational AI," Glean’s move to the plumbing layer may be the most defensive play in the industry. For a company that has raised nearly 800 million dollars to date, the goal is no longer just to help you find a document, it is to define the very architecture of how companies work in the age of intelligence.