In this episode of Driving Performance, we sit down with Akash Raju, founder and CEO of Glimpse, the AI-powered platform helping consumer brands recover lost revenue by automating retail deduction management.

Founded while Akash was still in college and officially launched in April 2024, Glimpse tackles one of the most costly and overlooked problems in CPG: deductions. Driven by retailer complexity, manual workflows, and outdated accounting systems, deductions can drain 20–30% of a brand’s profit margins, with a meaningful portion - around 10% of charges - being invalid. Glimpse uses AI to automate the entire process—helping brands recover revenue they’ve already earned.

Adgile cofounders Tom Shea and Max Flannery dive into Akash’s path from growing up in the DC suburbs to studying engineering at Purdue, where he gravitated toward entrepreneurship and met his co-founders. Before Glimpse, Akash sharpened his technical chops interning at Tesla—pulling 4 and 5 a.m. shifts on the factory floor—and later at Microsoft, building AI/ML tools for Python developers inside VS Code.

Akash also walks us through getting into Y Combinator, the interview process, and the moment it all felt real—flying out to San Francisco with his co-founders. Originally exploring ideas in experiential retail and product placement through Airbnb, the team made a critical pivot in 2024 after deep conversations with brands revealed a consistent pain point: deductions.

That focus has paid off. In 2025, Glimpse raised a $10M oversubscribed round led by 8VC, with participation from Y Combinator, Origin Ventures, Informed Ventures, and Allison Pickens, former COO of Gainsight—bringing total funding to approximately $17M. Today, Glimpse is trusted by more than 200 brands and partners, integrates with major distributors like KeHE and UNFI and retailers like Target, and delivers an average ROI of 4–5x, with some brands seeing returns as high as 33x.

We wrap the conversation with Akash’s vision for Glimpse as it expands beyond deductions into a broader AI-driven back-office platform for consumer brands.

If you’re a CPG operator or founder looking to better understand deductions—and how technology can turn a major margin drain into a growth lever—this episode is for you.