Glimpse's $10M Series A to Rescue CPG Margins

For many consumers, the grocery aisle is the avatar of post-COVID inflation. Even as headline inflation has cooled (from 9.1% in June of 2022 to 2.8% in February of 2025), food prices remain stubbornly high, driving popular perceptions of gouging. $10 egg cartons, once confined to artisanal producers in Portland who know every hen by name, have hit big box stores. But grocery is a famously low-margin industry, and for CPG brands, the cost of doing business can be prohibitive. 

While the grocery supply chain is riddled with inefficiencies and cost burdens, food and CPG producers arguably suffer the least leverage and the most volatility. Big chains buy most goods directly, but they also rely on middlemen - the distributors - for many goods, especially from smaller brands, who have to go through them to reach consumers. The two largest distributors, KeHe and UNFI, handle $16.7 billion in goods per quarter¹, and consolidation in the market has left brands with few choices.

Distributors extract value through a series of charges called deductions, which can eat up 30% of a brand’s gross revenue. These include:

• Trade Deductions: Marketing programs; promotional allowances; slotting fees
• Compliance Deductions: Shipping requirements; packaging standards; labeling violations
• Operational Deductions: Damaged goods; shortages; pricing discrepancies

Although ~10% of deductions are invalid or disputable, small brands are usually out of luck. Their prices are set ahead of time, without knowing what deductions may occur, and they lack resources to push back. In an industry that’s grueling and low-margin at best, deductions are an especially bitter reality with little relief available.

As brands scale, managing deductions becomes increasingly complex, forcing them to rely on expensive in-house analysts or BPO firms as “deduction busters”. Traditional deduction management is highly inefficient: it spans multiple retailer and distributor portals and layers of internal documentation, requires cross-validation with AR, sales, and operations teams, and each counterpart has its own unique dispute resolution process. Analysts must review receivables for deductions, sift through emails for backup documents, extract details from those documents, compare them to purchase orders, and, finally, initiate disputes through the required channels - all manually. It’s enough work for an army…or an agent or two.

Glimpse, our newest portfolio company, is building an AI-powered retail operations platform, beginning with fully automated, end to end deductions management for CPG brands. Glimpse creates a single source of truth by ingesting external retailer & distributor data, beginning with KeHe and UNFI, including deduction codes and amounts, supporting documentation and claims, compliance requirements, and dispute submission processes. These sources are combined with each customer’s internal ERPs, email, and document repositories containing items such as bill of lading (BOL), proof of delivery (POD), purchase orders (POs), and historical sales data. The Glimpse AI Deduction Analyst imports and categorizes deductions, checks contracts for validity, files disputes as appropriate, and handles reconciliations. What was once a series of fragmented operations, prone to data bottlenecks and leaking revenue, becomes one continuous cycle - a textbook example of our AI services thesis.

For CPG companies, the implications are massive. Finally, smaller brands that previously had to eat the cost of invalid deductions can fight back, while larger brands can slash BPO dependencies or augment in-house analysts, scaling deduction management and freeing them to handle more meaningful tasks. Longer term, we see Glimpse as a full retail operations platform, trading on its canonical data integrations and exposure to sales and finance to tackle high-value adjacencies like forecasting and trade promotion. 

Glimpse’s revenue model combines a low monthly SaaS fee with commissions on successful disputes, aligning service incentives instead of enshrining high hourly rates. This brand-friendly model has helped Glimpse achieve 10x customer growth in H2 2024.

Today, Glimpse announced its $10 million Series A, led by 8VC. As we studied the space, we realized this was a worsening, even existential business problem on a collision course with an elegant, powerful new paradigm. The founders, Akash (CEO), Anuj (COO), and Kushal (CTO) are an exceptionally cohesive and well-balanced team, with palpable spikes in growth, grit, and customer advocacy. Incidentally, we met Akash through his housemate, also an 8VC portfolio company founder - the famed network effect in action!

This round will allow Glimpse to build on their early traction, expanding their engineering and GTM/sales/marketing teams to serve more brands, and integrate with more major distributors and retailers. If you’re an engineer with a passion for neat LLM applications or browser and document processing automation, contact akash@tryglimpse.com. And if you’re a brand that needs Glimpse in your corner, book a demo here.

Beyond revenue recovery and streamlining retail operations, Glimpse represents a conviction that CPG brands can still make things - and make it - in America. We are privileged to pledge our support. 

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¹ https://disclosure.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/type/HTML/id/3254684

https://ir.unfi.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx