Crisp just tightened its grip on the retail data universe with a fresh $26M Series B1, and the signal is loud. Paine Schwartz Partners stepped in as lead, backed by Blue Cloud Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Cox, DNX, Prologis, and Wellington Management. When a company sits at the crossroads of a $15T supply chain and turns chaos into clarity, capital doesn’t wander in. It shows up on purpose. And with founders Are Traasdahl and Dag Liodden shaping this thing with the same precision they once used to build Tapad into a $360M exit, the trajectory feels less like growth and more like inevitability.
What Crisp does is deceptively simple to explain and brutally hard to execute. It ingests the fragmented retail data that keeps most teams stuck in spreadsheet purgatory and transforms it into real-time signal across 250K+ stores and $2.5T in retail sales. 7K+ brands rely on it, including Mars, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Target, Whole Foods, Walgreens, Amazon, Walmart, and the global CPG heavyweights that do not gamble on shaky infrastructure. They choose systems that perform under pressure, and Crisp has become the platform they trust when inventory, margin, and velocity all converge.
The growth curve looks like a physics experiment. 600 customers to 6K+ in 12 months. Distribution reach exploding from 17M to 627M points in a year. This is what happens when a system stops being a tool and starts becoming infrastructure. Then Crisp drops the AI Agent Studio into the mix, an engine that reads millions of datapoints and triggers actions that keep supply chains running like someone finally turned the lights on. Not someday. Daily.
Are Traasdahl and Dag Liodden are building more than a platform. They are constructing the connective layer for collaborative commerce, reinforced by acquisitions that were less shopping spree and more strategic consolidation. Shelf Engine brings perishable demand forecasting. Atheon Analytics and SKUtrak bring UK scale and TruDemand intelligence. ClearBox and ClearView add executive-level dashboards. Integral Group, SetSight, Lumidata, and Atlas Technology Group fortify the ecosystem with EDI, BI, and enterprise-grade integrations.
With leaders like CFO John McConnell, SVP Engineering Jeff Olchovy, SVP Marketing Dana Miller, and global operators Mark Smith, Guy Cuthbert, Ian Hall, Nick Marr, David Formosa, and Andrea Perlaky, the company is aligning talent with ambition. This new capital fuels deeper AI, broader retail coverage, global hiring, and tighter execution. Retail always claimed it ran on data. Crisp is the moment it finally starts running on intelligence.
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