L Catterton takes a strategic stake in the AI shopping agent Glance

L Catterton has made a strategic investment in Glance, the artificial intelligence shopping agent owned by a subsidiary of ad-tech company InMobi. The consumer-focused private equity firm announced the deal on 26 October, describing the agent as a bet on where commerce is heading.

How Glance works

Glance behaves like a personal shopper: it remembers a user's preferences, hunts the web for deals on the right looks, circles back with virtual try-ons and waits for approval before buying. The service lives in an app and in partnerships with Samsung, Android TV and DirecTV.

Scott Dahnke, global chief executive of L Catterton, framed the move as a wager on agentic commerce. "Agentic commerce is fundamentally changing how consumers discover and shop for products, creating significant opportunities for brands that can make the journey more personal, intuitive and engaging," he said.

"Glance is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this evolution, combining a differentiated consumer proposition with broad distribution across the screens where people spend their time," Dahnke added. He said L Catterton has spent nearly four decades investing behind shifts in consumer behaviour.

The firm sees agentic commerce as among the most consequential of those shifts, changing not only how people buy but how they are inspired and discover what comes next. Glance, Dahnke said, puts a personal shopper on every device and surface a consumer already uses.

The traction so far

Glance is reachable on more than 60 million devices in the United States. Naveen Tewari, who founded the company and also leads InMobi, calls it "an intelligence machine" that understands which products suit a shopper and then locates the best price for them.

The traction is already tangible. "We have 10 million monthly active users in the U.S.," Tewari said. "They're doing about 120 shopping prompts a month, so they're pretty active. Almost 15 percent end up buying something a month."

Tewari described the service as continuously learning, like a personal shopper who lingers through every purchase and deliberation. Glance does not eavesdrop, he stressed; it takes shopping feedback through chat and can interact with a smartphone camera only when the user authorises it.

With a nudge, Glance can also help someone watching a smart TV identify the clothes an actor is wearing and surface options to buy them. Tewari said the back-end intelligence works out the right product and warns a shopper before they overpay for something.

The economics resemble affiliate marketing. Glance earns a cut of the sale price, and for a fee it will train a brand more deeply so the agent fully understands and appreciates it. Tewari's pitch is that brands own their authenticity and the model learns it.

"The model does not have a limitation like you and I to remember only a hundred brands," Tewari said. "The model can actually remember a million brands." The argument is that smaller, authentic labels without scale get discovered by the right shopper at the right moment.

Tewari was careful about positioning. "We are not the owner of the [consumer] relationship, neither are we the owner of the brand's messages," he said. Glance sees itself as a distribution partner that carries what a brand stands for to the user accurately.

What the funding buys

The money from L Catterton will speed up training of the model and fund further scaling, cementing Glance's place among AI shopping agents. Tewari said no one alive has seen a technology as profound as AI, and described its power as being unleashed to find what it can change.

He framed the mission as a set of questions: can AI help a shopper choose better, visualise a product more clearly, and pay less. No figure for the investment was disclosed, and neither party released the size of the stake L Catterton now holds.

The deal gives one of the luxury world's most active consumer investors an early position in agentic commerce, the emerging practice of an AI acting on a shopper's behalf. L Catterton has paired its capital with a company already embedded across the screens American households use daily.

What comes next is the scaling itself. Tewari said the funds will go toward faster model training and broader commercial reach, but no timetable, headcount or revenue target was attached. The partnership leaves Glance free to keep building while L Catterton takes a front-row seat.

Support the content you love — it’s free 🎉

Add Worthbury as a preferred source on Google. Our stories will be more likely to appear in Google’s Top Stories. It’s free and supports our team. Thank you!

Add as preferred source

You can remove us any time in Google’s source preferences.

This briefing is published daily using an AI-powered system crafted by Worthbury's team and finely tuned to meet our editorial standards. While we continuously test and review the output, mistakes can sometimes happen. Tell us if you spot one.

Images: Glance