Remember when your favorite startup was doing something completely different? That’s the story of Glimpse, a San Francisco-based fintech company that just landed a massive $35 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). But here’s the plot twist: the company’s founders originally had a totally different idea before they figured out what actually needed fixing in the market.

Founders Akash Raju, Anuj Mehta, and Kushal Negi went to Purdue together and started out in 2020 building a platform for Airbnb product placements. Sounds random, right? Turns out, they lacked product-market fit and needed to pivot hard. “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”, Raju explained. Sometimes your worst idea leads you straight to your best one.

So what does Glimpse actually do? It tackles a problem that might sound boring but costs brands serious money: tracking invalid deductions from retailers. Here’s how it works: when a brand sells products to a retailer, the retailer sometimes pays less than what was originally billed. They claim reasons like damaged goods or short shipments. The thing is, some of those deductions are legitimate, but plenty aren’t, and manually tracking which ones are real versus invalid is a nightmare that costs companies major cash.

“A brand might ship inventory correctly but still be charged for a short shipment”, Raju said, highlighting how frustratingly common these errors are. Right now, teams have to log into multiple retailer systems, hunt down scattered documents, manually review everything, and reconcile it all against internal records. It’s the kind of tedious back-office work that definitely doesn’t need humans wasting time on it.

Glimpse’s AI agents handle the grunt work by logging into retailer portals, gathering all necessary documents, and classifying each deduction. They then validate every single one against internal data like supply chain records and promotion calendars to figure out which deductions are legit and which are BS. When invalid deductions are found, Glimpse automatically files disputes, manages the entire process, recovers the cash, and syncs everything back to the brand’s financial systems. What used to take weeks can now happen in days.

The company already works with over 200 retail brands, including major names like Suave and Chapstick. While the AI does most of the heavy lifting, Raju emphasized that humans are still in the loop for critical stuff like quality assurance and following up on disputes to actually get the money recovered.

With this fresh funding in hand, bringing their total to $52 million, Glimpse is positioned to become the AI infrastructure for consumer packaged goods and retail brands. “Our vision is to be the AI infrastructure for CPG and retail brands, and this capital helps continue executing toward that vision”, Raju said. Not bad for a pivot that started when three Purdue grads realized their original idea wasn’t cutting it.