$7B AI founder: "AI is not capable of replacing you right now"
Arvind Jain · Founder & CEO, Glean
In 2024, OpenAI asked its own investors to avoid funding five companies it saw as competitive threats: Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, the search engine Perplexity, and one enterprise AI company, Glean. Arvind Jain built Glean after a decade as a distinguished engineer at Google and after co-founding the data security company Rubrik, starting it in 2019, years before most of the world had heard of generative AI.
Glean is now valued at $7.2 billion, generates more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and employs roughly 1,500 people, one of the largest pure-play enterprise AI companies in the world. Its bet is that enterprises don't need Glean to build its own frontier model. They need it to be the context and intelligence layer that plugs into whichever model, Claude, GPT, Gemini, or an open source one, actually gets the job done.
In this conversation, Arvind walks through why he doesn't believe AI will let companies meaningfully shrink their workforce, even as it reshapes what people do all day. How Glean's own leaders, not just its engineers, are required to build their own AI agents, no exceptions. And why, after seven years running one of the most AI-native companies in the world, the feeling of having "arrived" still hasn't shown up.
Arvind Jain is the founder and CEO of Glean, an enterprise AI platform valued at $7.2 billion that he founded in 2019 after spending more than a decade at Google as a distinguished engineer, leading teams across Search, Maps, and YouTube. Before Glean, Jain co-founded Rubrik, the publicly traded cloud data security company, where he led R&D. Glean has raised more than $765 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, ICONIQ, and Wellington Management, most recently a $150 million Series F in June 2025. In 2024, OpenAI reportedly asked its own investors not to fund Glean, placing it on a list alongside Anthropic, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence. Arvind holds a BTech in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a master's in computer science from the University of Washington.
The most quotable moments from Arvind Jain
“Ultimately, the business success is indeed proportional to the human capital that you have inside the company.”
“Take a calculator. Does everyone know how to use it today equally well? I think that's what's gonna happen with AI.”
“AI should be used as a tool, not something that replaces the entire human task. It can replace 90% of the task.”
“My high school kids can tell you very quickly what text is written by AI and which one is not.”
“Everything that you build, instead of it feeling like your moat or your IP, sometimes it feels like a liability, because you have to quickly get rid of it.”
“AI is not capable of replacing you right now. Let's be clear, it's not ready to replace even a single human today, no matter what job they do today.”