Atlassian CEO Says Rovo Surpasses Glean in Enterprise Search

When Atlassian launched Rovo in October 2023, it entered an enterprise search market that already had a breakout player: Glean. Founded by former Google executives, Glean had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, pitched itself as the connective tissue across workplace apps, and quickly won customers by promising employees a single search bar for their corporate knowledge.

But Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes believes the startup’s lead has already evaporated.

“I would be shocked if [Rovo] is not seeing more usage than Glean by quite a long distance,” he said during a recent interview. It was a blunt statement from the Australian billionaire, who rarely shies from a fight when it comes to Atlassian’s role in collaboration software.

From Knowledge Graph to Rovo

Cannon-Brookes’ confidence stems from Atlassian’s long-running bet on data. For more than a decade, the company has built what it calls a “teamwork graph,” a knowledge graph that maps the relationships between projects, documents, chats, and teams across its products. That graph now underpins Rovo, which Atlassian says reached 2.3 million monthly active users within nine months of launch, growing more than 50% quarter on quarter.