The internet is a remarkable place to go window-shopping. Every shelf is searchable, every display can be rearranged, and a visitor can leave without the social inconvenience of explaining that they were only looking. For the shop next door, however, the interesting question remains behind the counter. How much did anyone actually buy? Moritz Thoma has made a business of getting closer to that answer.
Thoma, the co-founder and CEO of Grips Intelligence, works in the gap between the visible storefront and the less visible transaction. His route there began with a different kind of expensive decision: finding someone to sell a property. Across the two businesses, a pattern is worth examining. Both concern markets in which people must choose before they have a comfortable view of what everyone else knows.
An estate agent, then a market
Thoma studied Business Management & Administration at Touro University. In 2014, he worked as a real-estate analyst at DZ BANK, examining incoming property deals and financing. At 123makler, his responsibilities included acquiring business customers and working with investors. Those assignments place him at the commercial end of the story: finding the participants, understanding a transaction, and securing the money that lets the venture continue.
The detail helps keep the founder’s role in focus. A platform requires people willing to use it and institutions willing to support it. His early work included both sorts of persuasion, before the conversation turned to the value of sales data.
In late 2014, Thoma joined Christian Winkler, Fabian Winkler, and Jan Engelhardt in founding 123makler. The platform entered the German property market in early 2015. Its proposition was practical: bring homeowners and estate agents together, with information that made choosing an agent easier.
The service asked about the owner’s requirements and property, then offered ways to compare agents through their services and reviews. A homeowner gained a route through an unfamiliar professional market. An agent gained another way to find business. The name was brisk enough to sound like the beginning of a countdown. The decision it addressed could occupy a household for considerably longer.
By October 2018, PlanetHome had acquired 123makler. The acquisition announcement described a platform connected to more than 3,000 estate-agent offices. It also placed the business inside a familiar larger-company ambition: expanding digital services while retaining regional relationships. Software had become a means of organizing a network of people whose work still happened in particular towns, streets, and buildings.
That earlier business gives Thoma’s later career a useful starting point. Before selling intelligence about retail competition, he had helped build a service around making another difficult market more legible.
An evening back at school
In January 2018, Thoma returned to Schule Schloss Salem as a guest speaker. Daniel Schmeh, another alumnus with whom he worked at Cross Platform Solutions, had given students a workshop about search engines and websites. Thoma’s evening contribution concerned founding a company.
He described three requirements: an idea that could be implemented, a team with strong technical expertise, and investors to supply resources. He also discussed the possibility of failure and the questions surrounding a company sale. It was a fairly adult syllabus for an evening at school.
The visit offers a concrete glimpse of what he chose to tell younger people about entrepreneurship. Technical competence and financing received space alongside the idea itself. The company’s continued existence was a question to manage. A founder could have a product, customers, and a title, and still have a substantial list of things to worry about on Monday.
The tone matters because the later Grips ambition was expansive. This earlier appearance supplies some ballast: the broad plan came with a working awareness of teams, money, and execution.
The purchase after the click
Thoma has dated the founding of Grips in Berlin to 2018. The company previously operated as peekd.ai, a name still attached to some of his event appearances. By 2020, it was supplying online-sales data to financial-services customers. The first audience for the numbers was therefore already accustomed to asking what a business’s performance might reveal.
In June 2021, BattleFin featured him as peekd’s CEO and founder in a DataDrop alongside M Science analyst Spenser Marshall. The program promised data announcements, technical reviews, and use cases. These are the sorts of attractions that make a particular room of people very happy. A spreadsheet can have an audience; it simply needs the right room.
The distinction between a visit and a purchase explains the attraction. Traffic can indicate interest. A sale records a commercial outcome. For anyone trying to understand another business, those signals answer different questions. A crowded product page might reward a marketing campaign with attention while leaving the merchant to count something less satisfying.
Three moments. Three different questions. The last one puts money in the till.
In October 2022, Grips announced a $12 million Series A led by Blumberg Capital, with participants including Reciprocal, Social Capital, and UP2398. The announcement accompanied its push into transaction intelligence for brands and retailers. At that point, the company said its platform covered more than 2,000 online retailers.
Its approach combined online point-of-sale data with product classification and other signals to model sales across retailers. Product matching was central: a useful comparison depends on understanding which items belong together even when stores describe and organize them differently. The glamorous part was the promise of visibility. The necessary part included a great deal of sorting.
Led by Blumberg Capital.
Thoma’s stated ambition that November was to become “the 21st century Nielsen.” It was a revealing comparison: he was reaching for a business associated with measuring markets. He wanted Grips to extend its view across online retail globally. The ambition should be read as an ambition; the work lay in making particular purchases visible and useful.
Three levers, no magic button
By early 2023, retailers were asking what to do in a more difficult trading environment. Thoma joined a Grips webinar with John Fetto, Perry Ellis e-commerce executive Jay Nigrelli, and marketing professor Uwe Schnetzer, moderated by Lauren Freedman.
His advice returned to decisions a merchant could make: understand the competitive landscape, the products consumers want, acquisition channels, and customer retention. He condensed his priorities into a short list.
“Product, marketing channels and pricing would be the three levers I’d be focused on.”
Moritz Thoma · State of E-Commerce discussion, 2023
There is something appealingly workmanlike about that answer. A lever suggests a person making an adjustment, watching the result, and deciding what to do next. The three areas also involve different people inside a retail company. A buying team, a marketing team, and a pricing team may all need the same market picture for different reasons.
One concrete example comes from Grips’ work with Sally Beauty. Grips reports a 20% increase in paid-search revenue alongside a 10% reduction in paid-search spending. Those are company-reported results for a particular customer, rather than a promise about every engagement.
The account describes a familiar collection of questions: where to prioritize search work, how to improve conversion, and which competitors were taking share. It gives Thoma’s commercial proposition a human scale. Someone responsible for an e-commerce business has to decide where tomorrow’s effort goes. A useful answer must eventually be small enough to act on.
The rooms where numbers matter
Thoma’s public calendar has put him among people making those decisions. The January 2024 New York eCommerce Summit listed him for a presentation on data-driven e-commerce insights. The program was aimed at acquirers, including strategic buyers, private-equity firms, and aggregators. His slot followed presentations on the economic outlook and consumer insights.
The placement is instructive. Before an audience discussed buying businesses and creating value, there was time reserved for understanding the market. For this audience, the sales behind a storefront could influence the assessment of the whole enterprise.
Later in 2024, Grips announced that Thoma and COO Daniel Suchi would attend The Lead Summit. The invitation offered attendees a view of competitors’ e-commerce performance, down to their selling products. The same underlying information was being taken into another room, this time with a direct invitation to explore a retailer’s competitive set.
In January 2025, Datos announced a reseller partnership with Grips. The agreement added Grips’ commerce, search, advertising, and transaction data to Datos’ offering. Thoma said buyers were already combining the two companies’ datasets. The partnership formalized a relationship customers had practical reasons to want.
That detail helps explain a less theatrical side of building a data business. Distribution can follow the way customers already work. A useful dataset needs to arrive beside other useful information, in a form someone can put into a decision.
A ledger with a wider view
Today, Grips describes its product around daily, product-level units, revenue, and pricing, with delivery through dashboards, APIs, feeds, and AI tools. Its published methodology emphasizes measurement, validation, and delivery, including checks against customers’ own figures. The product has continued to change; the test of usefulness remains close to the merchant’s desk.
That brings the story back to the question behind Thoma’s career. An estate-agent comparison helps a homeowner choose. A view of competing product sales helps a retailer decide. The connection is an interpretation of the work, but it is grounded in the businesses themselves: information acquires value when it helps someone make a choice they could previously only approximate.
The internet’s shop windows will keep attracting attention. Thoma’s business is concerned with the quieter event that follows, when someone selects an item, accepts a price, and pays. The browser tab may close a second later. The purchase leaves something worth counting.