The e-commerce research platform putting a daily number on a question retailers used to only guess at: who is actually selling what, online?
For most of retail history, a brand could count its own sales and little else. The competitor across the digital aisle was a rumor - a launch announcement here, a discount banner there, a quarterly report months too late to act on. Grips Intelligence was built to close that gap. The New York- and Berlin-based platform measures daily online and offline product sales, then hands brands, retailers and investors an estimate of what their rivals moved, at what price, and how fast.
The company states its mission plainly: "to provide businesses with accurate, actionable, and complete digital data, empowering them to grow faster and capture new opportunities." Founders Moritz Thoma and Daniel Schmeh started Grips in Berlin in 2018 with a related ambition - to "shine a light on the blind spots and create the most comprehensive map of online commerce." Both sentences describe the same product: visibility where there used to be a guess.
Plenty of tools estimate how many people visited a website. Grips is built to answer the harder question: how many bought, and for how much. The platform converts transaction signals into estimates of revenue, units sold, average order value, conversion rate and pricing - the metrics that actually move a merchandising decision.
Those numbers arrive at two levels. At the domain level, Grips tracks a competing store's daily revenue, traffic sources and promotional activity. At the product level, it drills down to individual SKUs - which items are selling, which are new, and how their prices are shifting across major retailers and marketplaces.
Crucially, the coverage is not limited to the web. Grips describes its work as measuring both online and offline product sales, stitching signals into a single view of a category rather than a single channel. For a brand trying to size a market or benchmark a launch, that combined map is the point.
The output is deliberately built to be used, not just read. The company frames its data around three values - deep visibility, accuracy, and being actionable: "data designed to generate revenue, not just information." It is a pointed distinction in an industry full of dashboards that inform without changing a decision.
"Our mission is to shine a light on the blind spots and create the most comprehensive map of online commerce."— Grips Intelligence, on why the company exists
Monitor a rival domain's daily revenue, conversion rate, average order value, traffic sources and coupon activity - the shape of a competitor's business without waiting for their earnings call.
Track top-performing SKUs, monitor pricing and revenue per product, and catch new product launches as they happen across major retailers and marketplaces.
A self-serve e-commerce benchmarking tool and a browser extension that surfaces sales and performance signals for stores and products while you browse.
Free tools including e-commerce statistics and an Etsy product research tool for gauging demand, top products and pricing on specific marketplaces.
The free tools are more than goodwill - they are the top of the funnel that leads curious analysts toward enterprise data plans.
Grips serves an unusually broad customer base. On the commercial side sit brands and retailers such as Sally Beauty, SimpleTire, Discounted Wheel Warehouse, Walmart, Accenture, Lavazza and Nimble - teams that need to size markets, benchmark stores and time launches.
On the other side sit institutions that treat online sales as a research dataset: the World Bank, UCLA, Columbia University, Northwestern, Northeastern and Erasmus University. The overlap - a beauty retailer and a development bank buying the same signal - is one of the more telling facts about the company.
"Grips is a critical tool for me and SimpleTire, offering invaluable insights."— Adley Amzovski, VP Analytics, SimpleTire
The market for e-commerce intelligence is not empty. Grips shares the field with traffic estimators like Similarweb, marketplace and retail-analytics players such as Stackline, Jungle Scout and Marketplace Pulse, pricing specialists like DataWeave, and panel-and-transaction heavyweights including NielsenIQ, 1010data and Consumer Edge.
Grips' wedge is the emphasis on measured sales rather than proxy traffic, delivered daily and pushed down to the SKU. The problem it solves is specific: a category manager can watch a competitor's banner ads all day and still not know whether the new product is working. A sales estimate answers that; a visit count does not.
The second differentiator is range of access. A free browser extension lets an individual analyst taste the data; an enterprise feed serves a Fortune 500 category team. That two-speed model widens the funnel without diluting the core product.
The market context is favorable. As commerce fragments across marketplaces, direct-to-consumer stores and physical shelves, the value of a single, comparable map rises. Grips is betting that "complete digital data" becomes a standing line item for anyone who sells - not a once-a-year research purchase.
A small, remote-friendly team of roughly 21 split between New York and Berlin.
Grips runs a B2B SaaS subscription business, selling platform access and data feeds to brands, retailers, agencies and investors. Custom data licensing extends the core product for larger buyers, while the free benchmarking tool, browser extension and Etsy research act as the top of the funnel.
The company closed a Series A on October 25, 2022, reported at $15M+ (Apollo records list roughly $10M for the round), backed by Blumberg Capital, Social Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, UP2398, Techstars and others.
Moritz Thoma and Daniel Schmeh start Grips to map online commerce.
Grips begins supplying online-sales data to the financial services and investor community.
The round closes October 25, funding a push into transaction intelligence for global e-commerce.
A benchmarking tool, browser extension and marketplace research tools widen access to the data.
With a New York HQ and Berlin office, Grips demos competitor intelligence at events like the London eCommerce Forum.
It is an e-commerce market research platform that measures daily online and offline product sales, giving brands, retailers and investors competitor- and SKU-level estimates of revenue, units sold, pricing and conversion.
It was founded in Berlin in 2018 by Moritz Thoma (CEO) and Daniel Schmeh.
Enterprise retailers and brands such as Sally Beauty, SimpleTire, Walmart and Accenture, as well as researchers at institutions like the World Bank, UCLA and Columbia.
Rather than focusing on web traffic, Grips estimates actual product sales - revenue and units - at the SKU level, and covers both online and offline measurement.
Grips closed a Series A round in October 2022, reported at $15M+ (Apollo records list roughly $10M for the round), with investors including Blumberg Capital, Social Capital and Reciprocal Ventures.
Video: search "Grips Intelligence" on the company's LinkedIn and site for product demos and event talks - a public YouTube channel was not confirmed at the time of writing.