Jan B. Oudeman, Founder & CEO, Grivy
In aviation, the black box present on an aircraft holds unfiltered data; recordings of vital stories of what worked, what failed, and why. When it comes to our vast world of consumer brands, a similar black box has long existed between marketing and sales, and between digital goals and offline action. And for years, brands of global consumer packaged goods (CPGs) flew blind: aware of engagement, unaware of conversion.
In Jakarta’s rising tech corridors, where legacy collides with digital ambition, Jan B. Oudeman sits at the intersection—equal parts innovator, technologist, and entrepreneur. What once began as a childhood spark grew into a flame tested by failure, one that forged Grivy into what it is today. Jan set out not just to decode that black box, but also to redesign the cockpit entirely. And with Grivy, the commerce intelligence platform he founded in 2013 and leads as CEO, he gives brands the instrumentation to fly smarter. But this journey didn’t come gift-wrapped in speed or shortcuts. Rather, it’s a 12-year-long story of engineered resilience, reinvention, and a relentless belief that even the messiest blueprints can become scalable systems—if you lead boldly, learn fast, and never stop iterating.
From Straw Castles to Commerce Engines
Jan’s earliest ventures didn’t involve slideshows or spreadsheets. As a young child, he spent entire summers on his friend’s farm, transforming straw bales into imaginary “villages” with secret tunnels. “From the moment I could stack two things one above the other, I was building,” he recalls. By his teenage years, Jan was knocking on doors with a self-started flower business, discovering the thrill of turning a conversation into commerce. That intrinsic builder’s spirit from his childhood—to construct, to test, to tinker and take risks—stayed with him well through his youth and academic years.
At the age of 13, Jan entered a government programme grooming future fighter-jet pilots. Flying a plane at such a young age gave him an appetite for taking calculated risks. He narrowly missed the final cut, yet the dream of one day taking the stick of a fighter jet still burns.
It was a pattern that persisted. With an engineering degree in hand, Jan got a full scholarship from Erasumus University for MBA exchange programs at IE Business School and London Business School, seemingly on track for a high-flying corporate future. But surrounded by founders and venture builders, Jan felt a shift within: “I’m supposed to build my own engines, not maintain someone else’s.”
And so he did. At 20 years old, he launched his first-ever startup. Although a short-lived venture, it became the blueprint for what would one day power Grivy: how to iterate fast, own mistakes, and stay endlessly curious. True to the saying that your 20s are for learning, as your 30s are for earning, every single lesson became a building block for Jan’s future path in the professional world.
The Marketplace That Wouldn’t Die
Grivy was born from an ambition to help local neighbourhood shops match with the right customer at the right time. Jan’s aim for Grivy initially was to create a two-sided hyperlocal marketplace, aggregating demand and supply locally to spark sustainable growth. But the reality was far from easy. The “No supply, no demand; No demand, no supply” riddle kept replaying in his mind. Despite signing thousands of merchants and raising over a million dollars in funding, Grivy’s business model only gasped and never roared to life.
For seven long years, the organization ran in survival mode. Year after year, Jan would go to startup conferences and meet investors who would say things like “The one thing we really like about your company is that never seems to die”. Jan’s father even staked part of his pension just to keep Grivy alive, turning it into a defining test of soul and wits. “It felt like borrowing someone else’s heartbeat,” Jan remembers.
Then came 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic drained Grivy’s capital and sent its investors packing. Standing with his team at the cliff’s edge, Jan made a choice. “What if the real value isn’t the marketplace? What if it’s the data flowing through it?” he asked.
Grivy’s Pivot to a Commerce Intelligence Powerhouse
From that inflection point, Grivy pivoted hard. At this stage, Jan and the team had to assemble the new plane in free fall. With a new mission now to illuminate that black box between marketing and sales, it shifted from a struggling marketplace into a commerce intelligence engine. A transformative engine designed to evolve with quantum leaps in tech. Today, it bridges the gap between online to offline by unifying consented first-party consumer data, online engagement signals, and offline point-of-sale purchase data, delivering hyperpersonalized campaigns at scale. Campaigns that are built on real-world intelligence and campaigns that connect online consumer behaviour with offline sales, with the primary objective to deliver ROI positive business outcomes.
Where global brands once flew blind, they now see the full journey: from online ad clicks to in-store purchases and back to digital re-engagement. With Grivy, personalization doesn’t end at the screen, but fuels a dynamic Online-to-Offline-to-Online (O2O2O) landscape, turning each consumer touchpoint into a growth opportunity. From black box to autopilot. This isn’t just data—it’s the raw fuel for disrupting the entire CPG and retail ecosystem. This is about transcending traditional marketing and sales silos to create a symbiotic, AI-orchestrated future where brands don’t just sell products; they anticipate needs, forge unbreakable loyalties, and pioneer sustainable growth in a post-cookie, privacy-first world.
The impact has been transformative. Bootstrapped and profitable, Grivy is now growing at 200%+ annually, earning the trust of more than half of the world’s top 10 consumer brands. Its AI first neural network powers live campaigns across 85,000+ traditional and 50,000+ modern retail stores, creating feedback loops that sharpen results and deepen loyalty. “We’re building the autopilot of commerce intelligence. A mission-critical operating system powered by a 360-degree consumer graph that unlocks “moments-of-truth”, matching the right consumer with the right message at the right moment, the right place with the right offer across ad platforms and retail channels, in milliseconds,” Jan explains. Its all about neuromorphic computing for ultra-low-latency insights, predicting a shopper’s next crave before they even enter the store.
Leadership by Proximity, Principles, and Push
Jan doesn’t wear his CEO title like a badge, but treats it like a design plan under revision. “My leadership style is a living prototype,” he states, reflecting Grivy’s cool metamorphosis: values-led, fast-moving, and always in iteration. In the platform’s early days, Jan led from the front, elbow-to-elbow with fellow engineers, making sales calls, and launching marketing campaigns. As the company matured, so did his philosophy. And what did Jan do then? He codified a creed: Invent boldly. Own outcomes. Default to data. “Culture comes first; skill gaps we can train, but value gaps we can’t,” he says. And the result is a team that’s analytical, collaborative, and fiercely accountable.
Today, Jan sets the tone by keeping ambition just slightly uncomfortable on purpose. He challenges teams to push back, pitch unconventional ideas, and earn clients’ trust with measurable outcomes on the table. And when he needs to challenge himself, he relies on his advisory board of industry veterans who are unafraid to tell him if he is flying in the wrong direction and call out the difference between signal and noise.
Building a Future that Scales Smarter, Not Harder
Presently, Grivy is growing across Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, extending its presence without increasing headcount. The secret? A combination of agentic AI-powered automation and machine learning, smart and highly scalable infrastructure, and a privacy-first design that honors consumer trust.
Jan envisions a future where a brand can input a single prompt like, “Grow market share in Jakarta with a $50k budget,” and Grivy handles the rest: identifying, deploying, and optimizing. With 186M+ shopper profiles on the platform and many billions of shopping trips processed, the system keeps anticipating and adapting instantly and perceptively. As for Jan, that’s the future of Grivy, not of personalization alone, but also of self-optimizing commerce that scales 100x without 100x the payroll.
The Builder, The Believer, The Father
Balancing growth while staying grounded is no easy feat. But Jan approaches it like a well-tuned ecosystem. At its center is Gabrielle—his wife, first believer, and earliest investor—who once funded Grivy’s payroll from her own salary. With their four children, they spend monthly outdoor and camping adventures, and “meeting-free” Wednesdays, apart from deep work, are reserved for school runs and family dinners. As a devout Christian, he also prioritizes early morning runs on Bali’s shores—praying, reflecting, meditating, and reading his Bible, before the demands of the day unfold.
Jan protects his personal time with the same intention he brings to scaling Grivy. He enforces hard boundaries, delegates to avoid burnout, and practices a “deep-work” mindset for clarity over chaos. “Leadership is stewardship, not status,” he says, a belief that threads through his team, church, community, and the culture he’s building at Grivy.
Defining Real Success
For Jan, real success isn’t measured by a funding round or a media headline. It’s simply knowing that Grivy will still matter long after the confetti has been swept away. “Grivy doesn’t just solve a real business problem; it reimagines how growth can be data-driven, human-centered, and durable,” he asserts. But until then, his compass remains steady: build real value, scale with utmost care, and always, always keep learning.
“One day, I plan to trade dashboards for dirt tracks, buy an old tractor, and tend to vines on a hillside farm. I picture early mornings with espresso, and the freedom to mentor the next wave of dreamers from a sun-drenched barn in good old Italy,” he muses. “Meaning,” he opines, “isn’t found in the milestone, but in the mosaic you create, one hard-earned title at a time.” “It is all about doing something that is useful and makes the world a better place.” And right now, for Jan B. Oudeman, the finish line isn’t the goal; it’s the freedom to build what truly matters.