GRIN
Founded 2014 · 104 employees on LinkedIn · 12 known investors
GRIN is a creator marketing platform for brands, offering tools to discover influencers, manage relationships, handle payments and shipping, run affiliate programs, and track campaign performance. It also provides Gia, an AI assistant that automates creator marketing tasks such as prospect discovery and outreach.
Also known as GRIN · Grin.co
Founders & leadership
GRIN was founded in 2014 by Brandon Brown and Ryan Brown.
Investors · 12
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements- Undisclosed amountSeries DMay 2025Source ↗
Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026GRIN offers a creator (influencer) marketing platform that combines a creator CRM with an AI agent called Gia, which the company positions as operating a brand's creator program rather than simply providing software for a team to run manually. The platform spans the full program lifecycle described by the company as find, launch, negotiate, pay, track and report: guided setup in which Gia learns a brand's goals, audience criteria and performance benchmarks; creator discovery based on audience and content fit; relationship management and outreach sequences; payments to creators; performance tracking; and reporting through configurable outputs the company calls Artifacts. Gia also supports recurring automations (for example a scheduled weekly program review or daily creator review) and proactively surfaces flags, opportunities and creator updates, while approvals and final decisions remain with the brand's team.
A second component is the GRIN Marketplace, which connects brands to an opted-in network of more than 700,000 active creators. Creators use a free app to manage partnerships, track performance and find brand opportunities, while brands that join the Marketplace become visible to the network and receive Gia-generated creator recommendations for planned campaigns. The company states its recommendations draw on creator-marketing performance data accumulated over more than ten years, including vertical-specific engagement benchmarks across categories such as beauty, fitness, food, tech and apparel, and market rate benchmarks intended to inform negotiation.
Business model
GRIN sells access to its creator marketing platform on a freemium, self-serve basis. Brands can start free with no credit card or sales call, with paid plans beginning at $200 per month. Simple affiliate programs, including unlimited creators, links and codes, carry no commissions; the company charges instead for higher-value Gia work such as managing top-tier partnerships, running gifting workflows or building custom Artifacts. The creator-facing app is free for creators.
Subscription software with a free tier and paid plans from $200 per month, plus usage-based charges for specified high-value Gia capabilities; no commissions are taken on simple affiliate programs.
Traction
The company reports more than 700,000 creators in its network, over $1 billion in creator-driven partnerships and more than $215 million paid to creators. Customer case studies cite nearly 3x content output (Uber), more than 8,000 pieces of content in under two years (Stio) and more than 1.4 million monthly impressions.
Latest developments
GRIN's current positioning centers on Gia, an AI operator that runs creator programs end to end with human approval, alongside the GRIN Marketplace and free self-serve onboarding with paid plans from $200 per month.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market
Market position
The company describes itself as the AI-operated creator marketing platform and states it has been ranked #1 in influencer marketing on G2 for a decade.
GRIN contrasts itself with legacy creator marketing platforms that supply software for teams to operate, and with general-purpose AI assistants that lack access to a creator CRM, program workflows and network performance data. It also emphasizes a vetted, opted-in and active creator network rather than inactive accounts, and cites a decade of category-specific performance data underpinning recommendations.
Technology
An AI agent (Gia) built on top of a creator CRM and the company's creator-marketing dataset. Gia scores creators against 180 performance attributes drawn from more than $1 billion in creator-driven partnerships to produce qualified shortlists within 24 hours, and executes workflows across discovery, outreach, negotiation, payments, tracking and reporting, with human approval steps.
Go-to-market
Product-led, self-serve acquisition (free start with no credit card or sales call, roughly ten-minute setup) supported by customer case studies and testimonials, plus a two-sided marketplace in which brands become discoverable to the opted-in creator network.
Brands and in-house creator/influencer marketing teams of varying sizes, from self-serve starters to large consumer brands; named customers include SKIMS, ColourPop, IPSY, Uber and Stio. Creators are the other side of the marketplace.
Compiled by commissioned research from 1 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Competitors · 10
by search overlap
Companies competing with GRIN for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
▸Research sources · 1
primary sources listed
- GRINgrin.co · web
1 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does GRIN do?
- GRIN is a creator marketing platform whose AI agent, Gia, operates brands' influencer programs end to end.
- Who founded GRIN?
- GRIN was founded by Brandon Brown, Ryan Brown in 2014.
- Who are GRIN's investors?
- GRIN's investors include Base Venture Management, Inc., Bullpen Capital, Escalate Capital Partners, Eudemian Ventures, Forefront Venture, Good Friends, Moneta Ventures, PLUS Capital and 4 more.