Elorian, the Palo Alto AI startup that raised a $55 million seed round at a $300 million valuation before launching a product, has released its first model, Glimpse. The system is launching as a research preview with API access, while its chat interface remains waitlist-only.
The model's thesis is that today's multimodal AI, for all its skill with language and code, still can't really see. Most models look at an image once, convert it to tokens, and then reason about it in text — like describing a photo from memory. Glimpse keeps going back to the source: mid-reasoning, it can crop into a region, pull specific frames from a video, or run code to measure and compare what it's looking at, a mechanism Elorian calls a "visual scratch space."
The approach isn't entirely new — OpenAI added crop-and-zoom reasoning to its o-series models in 2025 — but Elorian says it built Glimpse around the idea from the ground up. A small team trained the model on a few hundred GPUs, and the result is substantially smaller than the frontier models it's benchmarked against.
Pricing is $0.60 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens. By Elorian's own evaluations, Glimpse outperforms GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short-form video captioning, with competitive results on other visual reasoning tasks.