We’re proud to continue to support Akash, Anuj, Kushal, and the team at Glimpse as they close their $10M Series A led by 8VC. It's been so fun supporting this relentless team since 2020 through a dozen(?) pivots and cannot be more excited for what's ahead.
Glimpse 1.0 was an Airbnb experiential product placement / marketing business. It took off during the pandemic and the team worked long hours shipping mattresses, pillows, massage guns, and more to hosts to place in Airbnbs throughout the country. I was the lucky recipient of a Purple mattress for our cabin in the Smoky Mountains! For these young founders (new college grads / college dropout), it looked like their big bold bet was going to pay off. We doubled down from our initial investment by leading the $7.6M seed with another $4M investment.
Then, 6 months after the seed, Akash called me up to let me know that he was having doubts about the business. Shoppers were going back into retail stores to try out products after the pandemic and brands became less interested in short-term rentals as a channel to reach consumers. The crazy growth in demand suddenly cratered when the world changed around us.
A week after, the team made the extremely difficult but quick decision to shut down Glimpse 1.0. They still had all the money raised in the bank. And instead of giving up on their startup entirely to look for jobs (which would’ve been the rational thing to do), they went to work on figuring out what Glimpse 2.0 could be. I couldn’t be more thrilled to continue to support them as they explored product liquidation (B2B), product liquidation (B2C), brand sales data analytics, along with others that I’m definitely forgetting at this point. Each pivot seemed promising at first (and all generated revenues!), but the team kept deciding that it wasn’t good enough.
That is, until a year ago, when they decided to start building the AI deductions agent for brands. This time, I was bracing for another “we decided it won’t work.” Instead, every month during our strategy meeting, Akash and team became more and more bullish. And the numbers looked more and more interesting.
Now, we’re excited to share that since launching in April 2024, Glimpse has worked with more than 125 brands to recover lost revenue, and continue to grow extraordinarily quickly. We’re also thrilled to welcome Jack and 8VC to the team as we continue building to automate deductions management and other tedious tasks for brands so that they can focus on what they’re really good at: creating delightful products!
