From pivot hell to US$35.6M Series B: Confido’s AI back-office playbook
Key points
Key takeaways from a YC Root Access interview with Confido founder and CEO Justin Hunter and CTO Kara Holinski (September 2026):
Fresh off a Series B. Confido builds an AI agent workforce for consumer brands, automating everything from accounting and cash application to sales planning and raw-material forecasting, freshly backed by a $55 million Series B led by Insight Partners. Customers span divisions of Mars and Unilever, plus high-growth brands like Olipop and Dude Wipes, with some contracts running to six and seven figures.
Origin. Confido joined Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch as "Outfit," a tool for fitness instructors moving outdoors during the pandemic. Group partners told the founders the idea was not worth pursuing, the numbers agreed, and the pair spent nearly a year in what Justin Hunter calls "pivot hell" before Confido emerged.
A problem hiding in plain sight. Justin Hunter had worked fora football-helmet manufacturer owned by a family office and at Anheuser Busch; his mother managed a retail store and his father sold software to consumer companies. Cold emails to Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper came back within days, with executives happy to talk for hours about how manual the CPG back office remained.
First customer before code. Confido's opening deal was closed ona Figma prototype, before a single line of code was written — proof, the founders said, that the pain was visceral enough for brands to bet ona two-person startup.
Why brands buy. CPG companies are big buyers of services — BPO, consultancies, third-party brokers paid around 5% of revenue — so Confido's pitch of "we'll do the work for you" lands naturally, positioned as labor replacement or augmentation rather than software-as-a-tool.
Platform over point solutions. Historically brands ran Excel spreadsheets or disparate point solutions anda "Postgres wrapper"; Confido unifies them intos a single platform where retail data flows in automatically and agent-driven insights power workflows — letting it land six-seven-figure deals faster than traditional ERP rollouts could.
Touching the whole P&L. The agents can automate almost every line item, reconciling down to a $10 transaction that a human never would; one newly signed public-company customer had skipped reviewing transactions under $10,000 because it was too manual, and even billion-dollar businesses forecast from historical averages.
Engineers, no product managers. The New York-based team runs without PMs: engineers own products end to end — longest-tenure engineer Ben now leads new supply-planning modules, spanning roadmapping, customer onboarding and sales. The founders' endgame: by the time a product reaches a store shelf, every step — sourcing raw ingredients, pricing, forecasting — will have passed through Confido.
Read more: YC Root Access on YouTube
