Last updated August 2026.

Inven takes a written brief, screens 28M+ private companies (Inven product data, August 2026), and turns the resulting longlist into company one-pagers or overview slides in your firm's own PowerPoint template. Grata is a keyword and website search for North American middle-market companies, and since June 2025 it has been part of Datasite. If the step after finding a name is opening a data room, Grata is the closer fit. If the step is a market map and slides for Monday's pipeline meeting, that work happens inside Inven.

Grata searches websites. Inven turns a brief into slides.

Grata finds companies by matching keywords against website text and company profiles, with coverage that users consistently describe as North America-weighted and middle-market. Datasite acquired it in June 2025, so it now sits next to the VDR most sell-side teams already use. Inven works from the other direction: you describe the mandate the way you would to a colleague, it returns a longlist or competitive landscape, and from there the same platform produces the one-pagers and slides the search was for. The data behind that is Inven's own, collected and structured in-house rather than licensed from PitchBook, Capital IQ, or FactSet.

If you just want the side-by-side, the standalone version of this table is at inven.ai/compare/inven-vs-grata.

How does Grata find companies?

Grata was founded in New York in 2016 to make private middle-market companies searchable through what they publish about themselves: website text, keyword matches, and event and conference data. That approach works well when a target describes its business clearly on its own site, and less well when it doesn't, which is common in older industrial niches and outside the US. Datasite acquired Grata in June 2025 and SourceScrub in August 2025, and is folding SourceScrub's conference and list data into Grata.

What comes out of a Grata search is a profile and a list. That is the intended product, not a shortcoming, and if your process is search, shortlist, outreach, data room, it fits. Where it stops mattering is when the mandate calls for a global longlist built from a brief, European registry financials, or research that has to leave the platform as a one-pager or a slide, because Grata does not produce any of those.

What does Inven do after the longlist?

You describe the vertical, geography, and criteria in plain language, and Inven returns a longlist or a competitive landscape drawn from its 28M+ company dataset. Over 1,000 teams use it for that today (Inven, August 2026). The part that separates it from a search tool comes next. Inven's Workflows pair written instructions with an output template: upload your firm's PowerPoint template once, and the platform generates company one-pagers and overview materials in your own layout, along with target and buyer lists, competitor overviews, comps, and market sizing. It will not write the CIM, but it gets an associate most of the way to the internal materials that usually eat the first week of a mandate.

The coverage claim is easiest to judge from someone who ran the same screen on both platforms. Craig McNally at Desert Horizon Capital put it this way: "There are a lot of companies that Inven has which other platforms don't. The same search with Inven brought a vast number of companies that software like Grata missed."

When should you choose Grata?

Keep Grata when your team already works in Datasite and the next step after identifying a company is a VDR rather than a research deck. The combination of website-based search and the data room in one vendor relationship is a real convenience for sell-side processes, and no part of Inven replaces the VDR. The SourceScrub integration was still in progress as of August 2026, so if US conference coverage inside Datasite is the specific thing you're waiting on, it isn't fully there yet.

In practice this is rarely an either-or decision. Plenty of teams keep Grata as part of their Datasite setup and run Inven next to it for the longlist and the materials.

When should you choose Inven?

Choose Inven when the mandate starts with unnamed private companies, especially in niche verticals or across borders, and has to end as a one-pager or a market map rather than a raw list. Inven carries 430M+ contacts for the outreach that follows, and its European registry financials went live in 18 markets as of June 2026, including UK Companies House. To be clear about the limits: registry data is not the same as analyst-reviewed financials on every European name, so if that depth is the requirement, Gain.pro is the better comparison. Likewise, PitchBook remains the reference for deal and transaction data, and SourceScrub is worth a look only if US conference coverage inside Datasite is still the gap you're closing.

The speed difference is the part customers talk about most. Lexar Partners reports sourcing roughly 10x faster, and Thomas Archer described the first session: "Within 30 minutes, we found and contacted multiple targets – that just wasn't achievable before." Augusta Advisors found 30% more qualified targets on the same mandates. A Director of Strategy reviewing Inven on G2 got at why: "The Inven AI prompts make it feel like I'm working with a colleague rather than a database."

How do Inven and Grata compare on coverage and contacts?

On contacts the gap is wide: roughly 8M on Grata, sourced from websites and weighted to North America, against 430M+ on Inven. Grata sells its CRM as an add-on; Inven includes one. Inven also surfaces intent-to-sell and succession signals, useful for prioritizing which owners to call first, and Grata does not publish an equivalent.

On company coverage, headline numbers matter less than what a specific screen returns. Run a niche vertical, a founder-owned services roll-up in a second-tier European market, say, and see which platform fills the page. That test is what convinced Desert Horizon, quoted above. Kyle R., in a G2 review, described the effect on day-to-day work: "It's like having a team of analysts working beneath you."

What do Inven and Grata cost?

Neither publishes prices; both quote per engagement. The only public reference for Grata is a Capterra listing of about $15,000/year for the basic plan, and it should be treated as what it is, a third-party listing from 2025 rather than a current Grata quote, particularly with the Datasite integration reshaping the product. Inven quotes three packages sized by team.

If you're weighing more than these two, the best alternatives to Grata piece covers the wider field. Or skip the reading and book a demo: bring a live mandate, run the screen, and judge the longlist and the one-pager it produces against what you have today.