Dispute-tracking fintech Glimpse announced Wednesday that it raised a $35 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from 8VC and Y Combinator.
Founders Akash Raju, Anuj Mehta, and Kushal Negi, attended Purdue together and were initially building a startup that did Airbnb product placements. That company launched in 2020, but by 2024, the founders pivoted to a wholly new idea: Glimpse, a platform that helps retailers automate financial deduction processes.
It raised a $10 million round last year, led by 8VC, after the business pivot, which it called a Series A round at the time. It is now calling this fresh $35 million a Series A round, and rebranding its previous Series A as a seed round. The company has raised $52 million to date, including funding they raised before they pivoted.
“We ultimately felt we lacked product-market fit and decided to hard pivot,” Raju said of the first, unsuccessful idea. “In this process, we had exposure to brands’ back offices and the chaos that was selling in retail, ultimately leading us to start Glimpse as it is today.”
They met their lead a16z investor through a mutual founder friend. “We built a strong relationship as we scaled the business. Really excited we can partner with them for this next stage of growth,” he continued.
Deductions are the amounts a retailer subtracts from what they owe a brand when settling an invoice. It’s commonplace and typically works like this: A brand bills the retailer, the retailer pays the brand. If it pays less than what was billed, it provides a reason, such as if the goods were damaged.
Some of the deductions are for valid reasons, but some aren’t — those are called invalid deductions, and they are tedious to track and manage on the back end. “These errors are surprisingly common,” Raju, the company’s CEO, said, adding that “a brand might ship inventory correctly but still be charged for a short shipment.”
“Teams log into multiple retailer systems, pull scattered documents, review line items, reconcile against internal records, and manage disputes end-to-end. The challenge is driven by fragmented, unstructured data and siloed workflows across systems and teams,” he said of how the process usually goes.
If the brand doesn’t reconcile every invalid deduction, that could lead “to consistent revenue leakage,” he said.
Glimpse says it helps with this process by reviewing deductions, flagging invalid ones, and filing disputes, helping companies recover money they may have missed or lost. The platform’s AI agents log into a retailer’s portal, find and centralize all necessary documents, then classify each deduction, Raju explained. From there, the AI agents validate each change against internal data (such as supply chain records and promotion calendars) to determine which deductions are legitimate and which are not.
The company said it works with more than 200 retail brands, including Suave and its lip balm brand Chapstick.
“When issues are identified, Glimpse automatically files disputes, follows through on the process, applies recovered cash, and syncs everything back to the brand’s ERP,” Raju said, adding that the product integrates across multiple systems. In addition to the main enterprise resource planning financial software, it integrates with promotion calendars, and retail portals. It can truncate a long process down to days, he said.
Despite Glimpse’s automation, Raju said his company does have humans in the loop, “primarily around ensuring outcomes,” he said, like “following up on disputes to drive resolution and cash recovery, as well as quality assurance on critical steps like classification and data extraction.”
The system gets smarter each time a deduction is processed and continuously refines its classification, validation, and resolution. “Over time, this creates a compounding data advantage, where each new integration and customer makes the system smarter and more effective across the entire network,” he said.
Others are tackling invalid deduction with software, too, such as Revya and Confido.
“Our vision is to be the AI infrastructure for CPG and retail brands, and this capital helps continue executing toward that vision,” he said.