Unwrapped

Teardown · glean

GLEAN

GLEAN

CategoryEnterprise searchValuation · $7.2B · 2024Site ↗
  • Sequoia Capital
  • Kleiner Perkins
  • Lightspeed
  • Coatue
  • General Catalyst
  • ICONIQ Capital

Your work apps + LLM API on retrieved chunks + packaged internal search.

01

Public data / API layer

Internal replication score

Easy
0.84

Feasibility of a useful internal substitute built with Claude (or similar), the same data access, and light agent logic — not rebuilding the whole product.

IRS = 0.30·D + 0.25·L + 0.20·O + 0.15·R + 0.10·Sthis record · 84%
  • D

    Data accessibility

    weight 0.300.90
    • 1.0mostly customer-owned / public / standard third-party sources
    • 0.5mixed accessibility
    • 0.0hard-to-access or proprietary source layer
  • L

    LLM substitutability

    weight 0.250.88
    • 1.0mostly retrieve / prompt / cite / summarize / classify / compare
    • 0.5mixed standard + custom behavior
    • 0.0strongly custom model behavior (fine-tunes on proprietary data, etc.)
  • O

    Output simplicity

    weight 0.200.82
    • 1.0straightforward internal work product (memo, list, reply, SQL query)
    • 0.5moderately specialized
    • 0.0highly specialized (e.g. FDA-graded clinical text)
  • R

    Review / risk tolerance

    weight 0.150.76
    • 1.0internal use with human review is acceptable
    • 0.5moderate risk
    • 0.0very low tolerance for error (e.g. external legal filings)
  • S

    Surface complexity

    weight 0.10inverse — higher means less surface dependence0.74
    • 1.0a simple internal shell is enough
    • 0.5polished workflow matters somewhat
    • 0.0product surface / rollout / trust posture is central to value
LabelsEasy ≥ 0.67Medium ≥ 0.34Hard < 0.34

Missing factor rows use heuristics from wrapper scores. Editorial heuristic, not investment advice.

Build it yourself

Recreate the workflow inside your org.

Internal build

Build it yourself

Same connector access + internal agent — useful for your team.

Internal use only. Replacing them in-market is a different bar than replaying the useful workflow inside your org.

01 · Connectors & flow

Slack
Slack
Google Drive
Google Drive
Notion
Notion
GitHub
GitHub
Confluence
Confluence
Jira
Jira

Internal build map

Data in

Connectors
Connectors

Agent layer

Planner
Tools + retrieval
Reasoning model

Logic

retrieve
permissions
rerank
cite
refuse

Outputs

Unified search
Answer
Citations

02 · Claude / agent prompt

Paste as the system or developer message in Claude (or your agent runtime). Scroll to read; Copy grabs the full text.

Claude / agent prompt

// Enterprise knowledge assistant — internal search pattern (Glean-class) You are a knowledge assistant for employees. Your job is to answer questions using ONLY information retrieved from the organization's connected systems (e.g. Slack, Google Drive, Notion, GitHub, Jira, Confluence, and any other indexed connectors your deployment exposes). ## What you must do 1. Retrieve before you answer: call search / retrieval tools (or MCP) to pull relevant chunks. Never invent facts. 2. Respect permissions: treat search results as already filtered; do not infer or surface content from systems the user should not see. 3. Cite every non-trivial claim: name the source (app name + channel, page, path, or link if provided). 4. Be concise and professional. Prefer bullets when listing multiple sources. ## When retrieval is weak If nothing relevant comes back, say clearly that you don't have enough in the indexed sources and suggest what to search or who to ask. Do not guess. ## Safety Internal use only. Do not repeat secrets, tokens, or credentials from retrieved text. If you see redacted content, treat it as unavailable.

03 · Result

Who owns Q3 roadmap?
Slack

Sarah — found in #product-team

~API spend + your time · internal use only