Glimmer

What do they actually do

Glimmer is a self-serve web app for searching extremely large PDFs. Users upload a file, ask natural‑language questions, and get concise answers with direct page citations so they can verify the source. The product is built for “egregiously large” documents (they advertise support for 10,000+ pages) and includes OCR to handle messy or handwritten text as part of its pipeline withglimmer.com.

From a user’s perspective: drag-and-drop a PDF, Glimmer chunks and indexes the document (detecting sections and parsing tables/figures), then you query in plain English and receive an answer plus the exact pages/snippets that support it. Their public demo shows this workflow on a 1,443‑page construction spec with practical queries like “Max moisture content for timber.” The product is positioned for professionals who work with long documents—construction, law, finance, and healthcare—and is available self‑serve (free to start) with an option to “book a demo” for larger accounts withglimmer.com demo YC.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Construction estimators and project managers: They need to quickly locate precise requirements inside multi‑thousand‑page specs and standards so bids and build plans don’t miss clauses that drive cost or risk.
• Litigation teams and contract lawyers: They must find clauses, definitions, and cited pages across large bundles of documents under time pressure; manual review is slow, expensive, and error‑prone.
• Financial analysts and auditors: They dig through long prospectuses, filings, and reports to extract exact terms, figures, and referenced pages for diligence and audit trails, which is tedious and easy to misread.
• Healthcare billing and compliance staff: They search dense policies, billing rules, and regulatory documents to avoid claim denials and compliance issues; manual lookup across long PDFs is inefficient and inconsistent.
• Maintenance engineers and procurement teams: They need to pull installation specs, tolerances, and warranty clauses from large equipment manuals and vendor documents to keep projects on spec and avoid costly mistakes.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Founder‑led pilots: personally outreach to target roles, index one of their real long PDFs, and run a live session showing answer + page citations; offer a short free trial to reduce friction and collect feedback for quick product wins (see demo) demo YC.
• First 50: Package the pilot into a short playbook and demo video for construction specs and legal bundles, then run targeted outreach via trade associations, LinkedIn groups, and webinars; convert each win into a case study and ask for referrals YC withglimmer.com.
• First 100: Add a dedicated salesperson to standardize discovery, pricing, and pilot‑to‑paid conversion, tighten onboarding and enterprise security/SLA materials to clear procurement, and pursue channel partners (DMS vendors, consultancies, spec repositories) to drive embedded pilots withglimmer.com.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Adjacent markets that pay for managing, searching, and reviewing documents sum to a large opportunity: document management (~$9B), legal tech (~$26.7B), construction software (~$10.8B), and healthcare compliance (~$3.2B), with broader enterprise search adding further billions. Because these categories overlap, a conservative de‑duplicated TAM in the low‑to‑mid tens of billions is reasonable, with an aggressive view reaching the high tens of billions DMS LegalTech Construction Healthcare compliance Enterprise search overview.

Bottom-up calculation:

If 250,000 mid‑to‑large organizations that regularly handle massive PDFs adopt specialized search at an average $20k/year (team licenses plus security), that yields ~$5B. At 500,000 organizations and/or a $40k average ACV via enterprise rollouts, the opportunity approaches ~$20B, with further upside as adoption expands across additional verticals and departments.

Assumptions:

• A large subset of construction, legal, finance, and healthcare organizations require dedicated large‑PDF search for workflows with verification needs.
• Pricing averages $20k–$40k per organization annually for team/enterprise features (security, SSO, SLAs).
• Adoption scales from early verticals to broader enterprise deployment over time; categories overlap so de‑duplication is needed when comparing to top‑down figures.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Humata: PDF Q&A for teams with source citations and team‑oriented plans; positioned for professional use with security and collaboration features Humata Pricing/Features.
• ChatPDF: Consumer‑oriented “chat with a PDF” tool with side‑by‑side chat and clickable citations; aimed at individuals and researchers rather than enterprise workflows ChatPDF.
• AskYourPDF: PDF chat product with an API for developers, targeting automation and embedding PDF Q&A into other apps (more platform‑oriented) Homepage Docs.
• Evisort: Enterprise contract and document‑intelligence platform focused on contract search and clause extraction within CLM/IDP stacks; acquired by Workday for deeper enterprise integration Evisort Acquisition.
• Docugami: Enterprise tool for turning long, messy documents into structured data and reusable components (IDP/knowledge graphs); stronger on extraction and workflow reuse than fast single‑file Q&A Product.