Arvind Jain – Founder and CEO of Glean

Arvind Jain is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur, engineer, and the founder and CEO of Glean, an AI-powered enterprise platform designed to help employees find information, create content, and automate work across their organization's applications and data.

Jain has spent more than two decades building large-scale technology systems. Before founding Glean, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he spent more than 10 years working across Search, Maps, and YouTube. He later co-founded Rubrik, a data security and cloud data management company that became one of Silicon Valley's fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses.

With Glean, Jain returned to a problem closely related to his experience at Google: finding the right information quickly. But instead of building search for the public internet, he set out to build a Google-like intelligence layer for the modern workplace.

Early Life and Education

Jain studied computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, earning his B.Tech. in 1996. He subsequently completed a master's degree in computer science at the University of Washington.

His technical career began at Microsoft before moving through Akamai and Riverbed Technology. These early positions gave Jain experience with large-scale infrastructure and distributed systems before he joined Google.

His engineering background would become a defining feature of his entrepreneurial career.

Rather than approaching startups primarily from a sales or business-development perspective, Jain has consistently approached company building through the lens of difficult technical problems.

More Than a Decade at Google

Jain joined Google in 2003 and spent approximately 11 years at the company.

During his time there, he worked on some of Google's most important consumer products, including Search, Maps, and YouTube. He eventually became a Distinguished Engineer, a highly selective technical position at Google. Jain has said that only around 20 to 25 engineers were at that level when he held the position.

His work included leading engineering organizations and infrastructure teams.

He also played an important role in Google Maps, including helping establish the company's MapMaker initiative, which enabled users to contribute geographic information and helped expand mapping coverage around the world. IIT Delhi credits him with helping establish Google's India operations and contributing to the MapMaker project.

The experience gave Jain an unusually deep understanding of search, information retrieval, distributed infrastructure, and products used by hundreds of millions of people.

From Google to Entrepreneurship

Jain left Google in 2014 to co-found Rubrik with Bipul Sinha, Soham Mazumdar, and Arvind Nithrakashyap.

The decision was not driven by a lifelong desire to become an entrepreneur.

In a 2026 Harvard Data Science Review interview, Jain explained that he did not leave Google with a specific intention to start a company. Instead, the opportunity emerged through his relationship with his future Rubrik co-founder and a broader observation that enterprise technology was receiving less innovation than consumer technology.

That distinction is important to understanding Jain's entrepreneurial philosophy.

He has argued that entrepreneurs should ideally discover a problem worth solving and develop conviction over time rather than decide they want to become founders first and search for an idea afterward.

Building Rubrik

Rubrik was founded to modernize data management and protection for enterprises.

The company's technology combined backup, data management, and cloud infrastructure into a more modern platform designed for businesses operating increasingly complex technology environments.

Jain led the company's research and development organization, drawing on his experience building large-scale systems at Google.

Rubrik grew rapidly.

The company reached a valuation of approximately $1.3 billion in 2017 and later became a publicly traded company. Jain's work at Rubrik established him as a major enterprise technology entrepreneur in his own right.

But it was actually his experience managing Rubrik that would inspire his next company.

The Problem That Became Glean

As Rubrik grew, Jain noticed a new problem.

The company used hundreds of different cloud applications and software systems. Information was scattered across email, documents, collaboration tools, CRM systems, internal applications, and other databases.

Finding information became increasingly difficult.

Jain observed that the problem was not a lack of information.

It was the opposite.

There was too much information, spread across too many systems.

According to research into Glean's founding, Jain surveyed employees at Rubrik and found that finding information had become one of the company's biggest workplace problems.

The experience reminded him of the problem Google had solved on the public internet.

He began asking a simple question:

Why couldn't companies have Google for their own internal information?

That question became the foundation of Glean.

Founding Glean

Jain founded Glean in 2019 with a team that included former Google and Facebook engineers.

The company's initial product was an enterprise search engine capable of connecting to the many applications used inside modern companies.

Instead of requiring employees to search separately through Slack, Google Drive, Salesforce, Jira, Microsoft applications, and other systems, Glean could provide a unified search layer across the organization.

The product was designed around security and permissions, meaning employees would only receive information they were authorized to access.

This was a critical difference from simply building another chatbot.

Glean needed to understand not only what information existed, but also who was allowed to see it.

From Enterprise Search to Work AI

Glean's ambition expanded as artificial intelligence became increasingly capable.

The company moved beyond search toward an AI assistant capable of answering questions, synthesizing information, generating content, and automating work.

Today, Glean describes itself as a Work AI platform that connects to an organization's data and enables employees to find, create, and automate work.

This represents a significant evolution from the company's original product.

The initial question was:

"Where is the information?"

The new question is:

"What can AI do with the information?"

The Rise of Enterprise AI

Jain has positioned Glean around a fundamental challenge facing large organizations: employees have access to enormous amounts of information but still struggle to use it effectively.

Traditional enterprise software created data silos.

AI creates an opportunity to connect those silos.

Glean's platform integrates information from an organization's applications and uses AI to provide contextually relevant answers and actions.

The goal is not simply to replace Google Search inside a company.

It is to create an intelligence layer that understands the company's people, knowledge, processes, and applications.

Agentic AI and the Next Evolution

Jain increasingly sees AI agents as the next stage of Glean's development.

Rather than simply answering an employee's question, an AI system can potentially complete the task itself.

For example, an employee could ask an AI agent to analyze customer information, prepare a report, update a business system, or coordinate a workflow.

Glean has increasingly focused on what Jain calls agentic AI, where AI systems can take initiative and perform work rather than simply generate responses.

In May 2026, Jain wrote about an Agent Development Lifecycle designed to help organizations build AI agents around measurable business value.

This reflects the company's transition from enterprise search toward AI-powered workforce automation.

Rapid Growth and Valuation

Glean has experienced rapid growth since its founding.

In February 2024, the company raised $200 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, with investors including Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners. At the time, Glean planned to significantly expand its workforce to support growing demand for enterprise AI.

By 2025, Glean's valuation had risen to approximately $7.2 billion, according to IIT Delhi's 2026 alumni impact report.

The growth reflects a broader shift in enterprise software.

Companies increasingly want AI systems that can work with proprietary corporate information rather than generic public knowledge.

Glean's position at the intersection of enterprise data, search, security, and AI has allowed it to benefit directly from this transition.

Building AI Around Enterprise Context

One of Jain's strongest strategic insights is that enterprise AI needs context.

Generic AI models may be powerful, but they do not automatically know a company's internal policies, customers, projects, documents, organizational structure, or business processes.

Glean attempts to provide that context.

The platform connects to the applications and information a company already uses, allowing AI to operate with a deeper understanding of the organization.

This gives Glean a role somewhat analogous to Google's role on the public internet—but for the private information and workflows of an enterprise.

A Technical CEO

Jain's leadership style reflects his engineering background.

He remains deeply involved in technology and product strategy while overseeing the broader direction of Glean.

His career has consistently followed a similar pattern:

Solve difficult technical problems → build infrastructure → turn infrastructure into products → scale those products globally.

At Google, the problems involved search, maps, and video infrastructure.

At Rubrik, the problem was enterprise data management.

At Glean, the problem is organizational knowledge and AI-powered work.

Philosophy on Entrepreneurship

Jain has a distinctive view of entrepreneurship.

He believes founders should develop conviction around problems that persist rather than becoming attached to ideas simply because they sound exciting.

In his 2026 Harvard Data Science Review interview, he explained that ideas developed over a few weeks can lose their appeal just as quickly. By contrast, encountering a problem repeatedly creates deeper conviction that it is worth solving.

That philosophy is reflected in Glean's origin.

Jain did not simply decide to build an AI company.

He experienced the problem of fragmented information firsthand while running another company.

The technology eventually evolved as the capabilities of AI evolved.

Leadership at Glean

Jain has built Glean around a team of experienced engineers and enterprise technology leaders.

The company's founding team included people with backgrounds at Google and Facebook, reflecting Jain's preference for technically sophisticated teams capable of solving difficult infrastructure problems.

Glean's culture is strongly product- and engineering-oriented.

The company competes in a market where security, data permissions, integrations, retrieval quality, and AI reliability are all critical.

That requires technical depth rather than simply a polished user interface.

The Future of Work AI

Jain believes AI will fundamentally change the way knowledge workers interact with software.

Today's employees spend significant amounts of time searching for information, summarizing documents, preparing reports, updating systems, and coordinating tasks.

AI agents can increasingly automate these activities.

The long-term opportunity for Glean is therefore much larger than enterprise search.

If successful, Glean could become an AI operating layer for the modern enterprise, connecting employees, organizational knowledge, applications, and autonomous agents.

This would put the company at the center of one of the most important transitions in enterprise software.

Arvind Jain – Key Facts

Full Name: Arvind Jain
Profession: Entrepreneur, software engineer, technology executive
Current Position: Founder & CEO, Glean
Company Founded: 2019
Previous Company: Rubrik
Previous Position: Distinguished Engineer, Google
Google Experience: 2003–2014
Education: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi; University of Washington
Degrees: B.Tech. Computer Science; M.S. Computer Science
Known For: Glean, enterprise search, Work AI, agentic AI
Previous Companies: Microsoft, Akamai, Riverbed, Google, Rubrik
Glean Valuation: Approximately $7.2 billion as of 2025
Patents: 28 patents, according to IIT Delhi

Arvind Jain's Entrepreneurial Legacy

Arvind Jain's career represents a rare combination of deep technical expertise and repeated entrepreneurial success.

At Google, he helped build some of the world's most widely used information products.

At Rubrik, he helped create a major enterprise data-management company.

At Glean, he applied the lessons from both experiences to a problem he encountered firsthand: the difficulty of finding and using information inside rapidly growing organizations.

What began as an enterprise search company has evolved into something considerably more ambitious.

Glean is now attempting to build an AI platform that can understand an organization's knowledge and help employees not only find information, but create, reason, and take action with it.

Jain's story also illustrates a broader principle that has defined his career: the best technology companies often emerge not from chasing trends, but from deeply understanding a problem.

For Google, it was finding information on the internet.

For Rubrik, it was managing enterprise data.

For Glean, it is making the enormous amount of information inside modern companies useful.

As enterprise AI moves from answering questions toward performing work autonomously, Arvind Jain is positioning Glean at the intersection of search, knowledge, and intelligent automation—and attempting to build the AI infrastructure for how modern organizations work.