Grivy: Driving memorable brand experiences with commerce-led personalization at scale
60% DevOps reduction cost and scale millions of users seamlessly
Saves 30% in monthly compute costs with on-demand processing
Filter information quickly on BigQuery ML for real-time market insights
Helps clients understand data easily and quickly with Looker Studio
Provides security and compliance assurance to customers with Google Cloud
Grivy helps customers leverage data to drive sales and marketing efforts through its platform with the high scalability and reliability of Google Cloud.
Grivy helps customers leverage data to drive sales and marketing efforts through its platform with the high scalability and reliability of Google Cloud.
In this digitally-driven economy, personalization is key to business success. Research has shown that consumers today are more likely to return to a brand that offers them a personalized experience. Against this backdrop, Grivy helps brands create personalized and engaging shopping experiences for their customers across touchpoints and retail channels. It leverages data, combining it with proprietary technology to deliver relevant and timely information and offers to shoppers, increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction.
While the business started as a technology services provider with front end solutions for restaurants and hotels, it pivoted to becoming a data platform in 2020, when the company also rebuilt its platform from scratch. This is when Grivy, with the help of Searce, adopted Google Cloud as its single cloud platform to deploy all of its applications.
Our user base is huge and we have partnerships with all the telco companies across Indonesia. To avoid bottlenecks, we needed a solution that would be able to handle peak traffic at any time, and we found Google Cloud to be the most reliable.
Jan Oudeman
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Grivy
“Our user base is huge and we have partnerships with major telco companies across Indonesia and regional in Southeast Asia. To avoid bottlenecks, we needed a solution that would be able to handle peak traffic at any time, and we found Google Cloud to be the most reliable,” says Jan Oudeman, Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Grivy. “When these telcos help us launch a new brand promotion, they would send it to millions of people at once, so we have to make sure that we’re able to scale immediately for users to access the platform without downtime or delay to provide a seamless experience.”
A platform that’s built for sustainable growth
The beauty of BigQuery is that the compute part is kept separate. It’s not tied to traditional transformations like extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, which means that we can take data, place it in BigQuery, and transform it later on. This flexibility has been tremendously helpful from an operational standpoint.
Aswin Thomas
Director of Business Engineering, Grivy
On the data side, Grivy uses BigQuery as its data warehouse, where it stores the first party consumer data, point-of-sale commerce data and behavioral clickstream data that comes through the platform. “The beauty of BigQuery is that the compute part is kept separate. It’s not tied to traditional transformations like extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines, which means that we can take data, place it in BigQuery, and transform it later on. This flexibility has been tremendously helpful from an operational standpoint,” says Aswin Thomas, Director of Business Engineering at Grivy. The on-demand processing has also resulted in a 30% reduction in monthly compute costs.
Apart from storing data, BigQuery ML allows Grivy to use predefined functions to quickly filter the information it needs, such as segmenting its users for specific use cases.
“Even though Gen AI is only being talked about now, Google Cloud has long had AI features like PaLM2, which is already integrated into its products making it easy for us to use these predefined models and just run with it,” says Thomas. For example, the team can find out the specific number of users from a particular region by putting in a simple query. To make it more presentable for clients to view data in real time, Grivy uses Looker Studio and is natively integrated with Google Wallet, Google Analytics, Google Search Ads, Google Tag Manager, Google Campaign Manager 360 and Google Display & Video 360.
Working on a serverless architecture that’s built to run out-of-the-box has been a big time saver for the company, and has resulted in a 60% reduction in DevOps costs due to reduced overheads and streamlined operations. The team has also witnessed a consistent query performance despite a 15% data growth every year.
According to Oudeman, one of the biggest challenges for Grivy is to help clients find their next best brand buyers. For example, someone who’s already buying toothpaste is not going to be looking for more toothpaste, but discovering what they will buy next is where Grivy comes in. “We are now looking to analyze data based on natural language models so that we can understand what consumer behavioural data tells us, and what that would mean for businesses,” he says.
A secure, reliable platform 24/7
As a company that helps other businesses grow, Grivy needs to accommodate the onboarding of large volumes of new users securely, anytime around the clock. With Firebase Authentication, users signing up for new accounts overnight can do so safely and without challenges. “We onboard millions of data profiles every month, and in the past, some systems would start to break down when it was overloaded. With Firebase, I now sleep very well at night because when we go live, you know, it just works,” says Oudeman. The company has since been able to achieve a near zero downtime even during peak traffic so that the user experience remains seamless and reliable around the clock.
Being on Google Cloud also means that all of the issues like having data clean rooms and meeting compliance SLAs are taken care of since the due diligence is already done. “The fact that Google Cloud meets the various GDPR and ISO compliance gives our customers the assurance that their data is secure, since everything that is stored with us is stored on Google Cloud,” says Thomas.
Delivery online-to-offline
What makes Grivy stand out from its competitors is its ability to connect online to offline platforms. Brands may sometimes launch promotions online to increase in-store sales and drive brand growth by recruiting new consumers. To support these initiatives, Grivy uses Google Maps API to suggest the closest store where consumers can purchase the items promoted to them. When consumers visit the store and make the purchase, it truly becomes a full-funnel marketing exercise.
With more than 50,000 modern retail stores on its platform, brands can provide details of the closest stores and product availability based on the customer’s location. “For example, if someone opens an ad on their mobile phone, they would be able to see all the places near them where they can purchase that particular item,” says Oudeman.
Beyond providing real-time location services, Grivy is tapping into Vertex AI to provide a more hyper-personalized customer experience. The team is working on enabling even non-technical teams to create custom campaigns using Gemini Flash and text embeddings to generate summaries and insights from campaign data, subsequently creating customer audiences tailored to specific use cases with the ultimate goal of driving personalization at scale
Paving the way for a multi-region business on a reliable data platform
With Google Cloud being a global platform, Grivy can go-to-market in a new country or anywhere around the world overnight, knowing that they have all their data available at their fingertips.
However, more than the availability of data, it's the availability of recent data that will drive the business forward. One of the benefits that Grivy has found in Google Cloud is in the data synchronization availability that transcends regions and zones. “When you do read and write operations, you don’t want to be working with stale data, only with the most recent and live data. The capability of Google Cloud to synchronize data cross-regionally such that we’re able to always have access to the most updated data puts us in a good position from an expansion standpoint,” shares Thomas.
Moving forward in a Gen AI-driven environment
Grivy’s main use case for Gen AI is to reduce complexity in this highly data-driven world. “We’re working with brand managers, digital media managers, marketers, category managers and sales managers, all of which have different sets of key performance indicators (KPIs). We want to be able to make recommendations that are specific to their needs using Gen AI, so they can actually use those recommendations to make an impact,” says Oudeman.
Understanding that Gen AI can only be successful given the right data sets, Grivy continues to educate its clients on the importance of growing and streamlining their data. At the same time, the company has ongoing discussions with Searce and the Google team to explore the new technologies and capabilities that Google Cloud has to offer.
We certainly have a lot in store, and even now we’re having active discussions around different AI use cases. Together with Google Cloud, I believe we will continue to create solutions that will bring greater value to our customers as we scale.
Jan Oudeman
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Grivy
“We certainly have a lot in store, and even now we’re having active discussions around different AI use cases. Together with Google Cloud, I believe we will continue to create solutions that will bring greater value to our customers as we scale,” says Oudeman.
Grivy is an operating system (OS) provider for commerce-led personalization solutions that help brands create personalized and engaging consumer experiences across touchpoints and retail channels. The company leverages data and technology to deliver relevant and timely information to increase sales and build brand loyalty.
Industry: Technology
Location: Indonesia
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, BigQuery ML, Cloud Storage, Firebase, Looker, Natural Language AI, Vertex AI
About Google Cloud Partner - Searce
Searce is a technology provider that aims to drive intelligent outcomes for customers. Specializing in cloud, AI and analytics, Searce is a Google Cloud partner that pushes the boundaries of tech innovation with end-to-end industry solutions.
