He made Forbes 30 Under 30 for a company he then threw away. The second version of Glimpse - AI that fights retail's most boring, most expensive fee - just raised $35 million.
In 2020, three classmates from Purdue put their names on a company and, not long after, on a Forbes list. Akash Raju, Anuj Mehta and Kushal Negi had built Glimpse, a business that placed products - cans of Liquid Death, Purple mattresses - inside vacation rentals so guests could try them in the wild. It got into Y Combinator. It landed in about 15,000 rentals. In 2023 it earned the trio a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 for retail and e-commerce. By most measures, they had made it.
Then they took the whole thing apart.
This is the part of founder stories that usually gets sanded down into a clean arc. Raju's version refuses to cooperate. He didn't sell the first company or ride its growth into a bigger valuation. He looked at a business that was working and decided it would eventually stop being worth doing - and that walking away was the more honest move than pretending otherwise.
Growth is a seductive metric. It looks like proof. Glimpse 1.0 had it in certain categories, and it had the outside validation - the accelerator badge, the press, the award. What it did not have, in Raju's read, was the kind of pull where customers would tear your arm off to keep using the thing. There is a difference between a business people like and a business people need, and that difference is where a lot of startups quietly die a few years later.
So during the early stretch of the pandemic, the founders did something that sounds more like a dare than a strategy. They moved in together. For three months they lived in a basement and rebuilt from nothing, testing ideas the way you'd audition songs - play one, watch the room, cut it, try the next.
The pivot didn't arrive as a lightning bolt. It arrived as a grind. The team spent roughly 15 months moving from the old idea toward a new one, and the engine that drove it was almost embarrassingly simple: talk to people, all day, every day.
What they kept hearing about was retail - specifically, how confusing and expensive it is to sell a physical product through big distributors and retailers. Buried in that mess was a word that makes most people's eyes glaze over: deductions. When a retailer pays a brand, it often subtracts fees along the way - for shortages, damages, promotions, compliance, and a long tail of reasons that may or may not be legitimate. Brands can lose a meaningful chunk of profit to charges they never had time to check.
The moment it clicked came at a trade show. Raju explained the rough concept to a prospective customer and got back the sentence every founder is secretly hunting for.
That was the pull that Glimpse 1.0 never quite had. From there it became a weekly loop - new customers, new feedback, a product bending itself to match what the market was actually frustrated by. Raju has a tidy line for the whole ordeal.
Here is the quietly clever part. Deductions are the least glamorous problem in retail. Nobody grows up wanting to reconcile invoices or dispute a chargeback line by line. That is exactly why it was open. The unsexy corners of huge markets are where the money hides, because everyone capable of fixing them would rather build something with a nicer demo.
Glimpse's answer is a set of AI agents that do the drudgery end to end. They log into retailer portals, pull and centralize the documents, read freight and invoice paperwork, classify each deduction, check it against supply chain records, and file disputes automatically when a charge doesn't hold up. Work that used to take finance teams weeks gets compressed into days.
The numbers customers report are the kind that make a CFO sit up. One roughly $1B company ran 17,000 deductions through the platform in 24 hours - a stack of work that would take a person something like two years by hand.
In March 2026, Glimpse announced a $35 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with 8VC and Y Combinator joining, bringing the total raised to $52 million. The pitch underneath it is bigger than deductions. Consumer packaged goods is one of the largest markets on earth by volume, and it still runs on spreadsheets, portals and manual reconciliation. Roughly $100 billion a year gets spent on back-office labor that barely moves the needle on productivity.
Deductions are the wedge. The ambition is the whole operational layer beneath a brand - the invisible plumbing that decides whether a company can grow without hiring an army of finance staff. Raju states the destination plainly.
Raju's resume before all this reads like a series of safe options he declined to settle into. He studied computer engineering, entrepreneurship and industrial management at Purdue. Before that, he came through Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the country's most competitive STEM schools. Along the way he wrote software at Tesla and Verisign, did research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and worked as a program manager at Microsoft.
Any one of those could have been a career. What connects them to Glimpse is a pattern that shows up again in the pivot: a willingness to leave a known-good situation for one with more upside and less certainty. The basement, the 500 conversations, the decision to rebrand his own first Series A as a seed round rather than protect the story - all of it points to a founder who cares more about where the company lands than how the arc reads.
The customer list now includes names most people have in a bathroom cabinet or a fridge - Suave, Chapstick, Lemon Perfect - alongside more than 200 brands and retail partners. The through-line from vacation-rental shelves to enterprise finance software isn't obvious on paper. It makes sense the moment you accept that Raju was never really in the product-placement business or the deductions business. He was in the business of finding a problem worth building a decade around, and he was willing to be wrong twice to get there.
There is a version of this profile where the pivot is the villain - the failure that had to be survived. That reading gets it backwards. The pivot is the most competent thing in the story. Refusing to do it would have been the failure. What Glimpse is today exists because its founder treated a working company as evidence to be questioned rather than a trophy to be kept.