Today we’re excited to share details on Glean AI, the first truly strategic Accounts Payable (AP) platform that helps companies save money through deep insights and automation. Since adding our first customer in June 2021, we’ve helped businesses uncover savings insights, understand, and optimize over $500M in vendor spend using machine learning to analyze deal terms, line-item data, redundant offerings, and negotiation opportunities.

This is just the beginning of our journey. To usher us into our next phase of growth, Glean AI has raised $10.8M in seed and pre-seed financing from Contour Venture Partners, Amex Ventures, Infinity Ventures (from the team that led Paypal Ventures), B Capital, Portage Ventures, Parameter Ventures, Gilgamesh Ventures, and several other prominent venture funds and fintech angels.  While we’ve been heads down on product and engineering since day one, the new funds will allow us to build out our go-to-market efforts so more companies can experience Glean AI.

“One of the largest pain points for the businesses we work with is that there hasn’t been a way to understand and control spending that happens outside of expense cards. We invested in Glean AI because they make it easy for businesses to dig into their invoiced spend and uncover potentially wasteful spend.  Using Glean AI, businesses can optimize their vendor spending in a way that has not been possible before,” said Margaret Lim, Managing Director, Amex Ventures.

In addition to powerful automation that allows companies to pay invoices faster and cut out the manual work, Glean AI is the only platform that analyzes line-item data for game-changing insights. By breaking invoices down by what was purchased and how much it cost (rather than just the total amount spent), we can understand trends, purchasing behavior, and the opportunity for savings. With this information, we use algorithms to proactively identify areas where money is being misspent (such as excess licenses or incorrect pricing), as well as opportunities to help negotiate better deals with vendors based on our aggregated benchmarking data.

Brands like Alloy have switched from other AP processing systems to Glean AI and seen an instant transformation in how they do business. Their Sr. Account Associate, Rebecca Vanek noted, "Switching to Glean AI has been great at facilitating team collaboration, the granular spend and benchmarking data has been extremely valuable to us and the company leadership."

Prior to Glean AI, I served as CFO at Better.com and On Deck, two fintech pioneers. In both roles, I had great visibility into what drove revenue and could double-click into the details, but when it came to our company spend, things became much murkier. Determined to dig into the data, we were able to identify $1.5M in potential savings - but not without several weeks of my team’s time, endless complex & confusing spreadsheets, and lots of headaches along the way.  It was rushed and an imperfect process, and I know we would’ve found even more savings with better data.  Glean AI aims to automate what my team accomplished, so Finance teams can focus on strategic work that moves the business forward.

While this was a firsthand experience, it really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in - virtually every business has a Finance team that is left to deal with paying vendors and budgeting future spend, and so the problem we are solving is universal.  If you’re excited about what we’re building and the opportunity ahead, get in touch by reaching out at hello@glean.ai.

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