The Pinterest ad looks straightforward enough: a colorful bath product promising stress relief. Click it, and you're not redirected to some generic landing page or store locator that may or may not reflect what's actually on shelves. Instead, you land directly in a retailer's cart—the product is there, in stock, ready to purchase.
This seemingly modest technical achievement represents Minneapolis-based Pear Commerce's answer to what has become a $62 billion headache for the retail media industry: nobody can reliably prove which ads actually drive people into stores.
On June 27, 2024, the startup secured $10 million in Series A funding, led by Stage 2 Capital, with backing from Heartland Ventures, Homegrown Ventures, Dundee Venture Capital, M25, and angel investor Daren Cotter. Previous investors Great North Ventures and Mairs & Power Venture Capital returned, with Great North increasing its stake from an initial 2019 bet.
The timing isn't coincidental. Retail media—the practice of brands advertising on retailer platforms or through shoppable links—is projected to surpass $62 billion in U.S. spending this year, adding $10 billion in new ad dollars in 2025 alone, according to eMarketer. Globally, the category is forecast to hit $176.9 billion, eclipsing total television advertising revenue.
Yet the industry's explosive growth is running headlong into a measurement crisis that even its biggest proponents acknowledge.
When Inventory Data Goes Stale
At the Commerce Media Brand Summit earlier this year, brand leaders aired familiar grievances: attribution windows that don't align across platforms, double-counting that inflates performance metrics, and retailer networks that grade their own homework. The fundamental problem? Most "where to buy" solutions operate on inventory data that's anywhere from days to weeks old, then can't definitively connect an ad impression to a store visit or purchase.
Pear's co-founders, Eric Martell and Alex Wyler, argue they've built something different. The pair previously collaborated on EatStreet, a food delivery platform they launched while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their second act involves scanning inventory across 165,000 retail locations daily—a figure they claim represents 3,000+ retail banners and roughly 60 times the industry standard, though that comparison lacks clear context about what constitutes "standard."
The company's Pear Connect product routes shoppers from social or display ads directly into retailer carts when inventory exists, then feeds click-level data back to advertising platforms for audience refinement. According to Pear's internal metrics, this generates "29x more traffic" than conventional landing pages. It's an impressive claim, albeit one based on the company's own analysis rather than third-party verification.
Dr. Teal's—a bath and body line from PDC Brands—offers the closest thing to a public proof point. The brand reported 10x growth in retailer visits over seven months using Pear's platform, while building custom audiences that the company says performed five times better than third-party alternatives. Whether that success translates across different product categories and price points remains to be seen.
The Pinterest Test Case
The real validation came in September 2025, when Pinterest integrated Pear Commerce into its U.S. Ads Manager. CPG advertisers can now add shoppable retailer links directly within Pinterest ads at no extra cost. (MikMak, an established competitor, also integrated for its existing client base.)
Pinterest's early testing suggested higher engagement than external landing pages, though the platform hasn't released detailed performance data. The partnership arrived alongside Pinterest's broader retail media collaboration with Instacart, announced in June 2025—a signal that Pinterest sees commerce infrastructure as critical to its advertising business.
For Pear, the Pinterest integration represents something perhaps more valuable than revenue: a high-visibility test of whether real-time inventory data genuinely belongs at the center of the commerce media stack. If brands see meaningful performance lifts, the startup's thesis gains credibility. If results prove mixed, well, there's a reason established players have taken different approaches.
Pear claims "five of the top 20 CPGs" now use its platform, though the company publicly names only Dr. Teal's, Faribault Foods, and Crystal Farms. That selective disclosure is standard startup practice, but it does make independent assessment difficult.
A Fragmented Competitive Landscape
The $10 million will fund product development, market expansion, and senior hires across sales, engineering, and customer success. The company currently employs between 11 and 50 people—a wide range that suggests it's navigating rapid scaling.
Pear operates in a crowded field. MikMak claims relationships with more than 8,000 retailers across 100 countries. PriceSpider has entrenched relationships with major CPG brands. Criteo and Swiftly offer competing retail media infrastructure. Each approaches the attribution problem differently, and none has definitively "solved" it.
Pear differentiates on North American store-level coverage and what it describes as implementation speed—claiming 98% of setup is handled internally and onboarding runs six times faster than competitors. Again, the comparison lacks clear benchmarks, though faster deployment would matter significantly to brands running dozens of simultaneous campaigns.
"Pear Commerce is uniquely positioned to help brands unlock the full potential of shoppable media," said Liz Christo of Stage 2 Capital in the funding announcement—the kind of optimistic statement investors make when backing Series A startups.
Martell, who previously served as managing director at gener8tor Minnesota, emphasized the company's focus on "transparent, actionable data" in the release. That particular phrase—transparent data—resonates in an industry where brands have grown increasingly frustrated with black-box attribution models.
The Measurement Question Persists
Whether daily inventory scans and pixel-level signals actually solve retail media's attribution mess is still an open question. The problems run deeper than technology. Retailers have conflicting incentives to share granular data. Brands want credit for every possible touch point. Ad platforms optimize for their own metrics.
But Pear now has Pinterest routing CPG ads through its infrastructure, which means the startup's approach will get stress-tested at meaningful scale. If it works—if brands see clearer attribution and better performance—expect other platforms to follow. If the results disappoint, the industry will keep searching for its measurement Holy Grail.
For now, Pear is betting that CPG brands will pay for the promise of knowing whether that Pinterest ad actually drove someone to Target, Walmart, or their local grocery chain. In an industry awash with capital but starved for certainty, that's not the worst bet to make.
