Cellular recognition is an important biological process, which allows cells to communicate, sense their environment, and in the case of immune cells, coordinate and mount an appropriate response. For instance, human cells feature a dense network of carbohydrates known as the glycocalyx. Depending on the type of sugars present and their connectivity, these carbohydrates can serve as ligands for a specific binding partner (e.g., cell surface receptor). However, the binding affinity of a single sugar residue is typically weak, but Nature has evolved to overcome this through a robust multivalent approach, where numerous copies of a sugar are linked and presented in a manner to increase binding interactions. This incredibly simple solution to an otherwise challenging problem, inspired us to develop mvGlu featured in the present work. In addition to being superior relative to the standard glucose ligand for targeting cancer, the mvGlu moiety is also a powerful aggregation blocking agent owing to its branched architecture which was enabled by the strategic use of glycerol as the scaffold. As we have demonstrated through various in vitro and in vivo spectral unmixing experiments, appending mvGlu to an AB result in a substantial gain in signal intensity. We anticipate mvGlu will be generalizable, where it will have a similar benefit when installed onto other imaging platforms (especially SWIR dyes). A boost in sensitivity is profound because this means a lower dye concentration will be needed to achieve the same readout and this results in less perturbation to the system under investigation.