Gian Maria Gramondi

Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Circeus

Last Reviewed: September 29, 2026

Executive Summary

Gian Maria Gramondi is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Circeus, the London-based group that acquires B2B software products and rebuilds them for an AI-native market. He started the business in April 2021 as Shop Circle with Luca Cartechini, a classmate from ESCP Business School, with a thesis drawn from his time at Amazon: independent online merchants needed better software and were poorly served by a fragmented app market. Shop Circle became a serial acquirer of e-commerce software, and in June 2026 the group adopted Circeus as its holding-company name, keeping Shop Circle as its commerce division. Where his co-founder runs the group as CEO, Gramondi’s side of the partnership is operational: making acquired products run and grow.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and COO of Circeus, formerly Shop Circle, and a director of Shop Circle Ltd since its incorporation on 15 April 2021.
• Helped build a group that reports 18 acquisitions over four years, more than 200,000 businesses served and more than $220 million in total capital, with offices in London, Milan and Sarajevo.
• Named with Cartechini to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2022 list in the Technology and Big Money Startups categories.
• Worked at Amazon as a brand specialist and category manager, in roles spanning marketing, advertising and category management.
• Began as a strategy consultant at Deloitte Luxembourg.

Professional Journey

Gramondi studied economics and management at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, graduating cum laude, and then took a Master in Management at ESCP Business School, where in 2015 he met Luca Cartechini. He also holds a master’s in international management from Bayes Business School in London.

He began his career as a strategy consultant at Deloitte in Luxembourg. By his own account, consulting taught him that the part of the work he enjoyed most was execution, and he moved into e-commerce at Amazon, where he held several roles across marketing, advertising and category management, including brand specialist and category manager. That vantage point, watching brands of every size struggle with the same operational problems on the marketplace, gave him what Founders Factory describes as founder-market fit: he could identify closely the problems merchants were facing.

In 2021 he and Cartechini founded Shop Circle in London. Rather than build a single product, they bought existing apps used by online merchants and ran them together, betting that the shift to online shopping had only just begun and that millions of independent brands would need tooling. By mid-2022 ESCP reported the company had reached more than 40,000 merchants and raised $65 million in equity and debt, and both founders were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list.

The group has since widened from e-commerce apps into mission-critical B2B software more broadly. On 29 June 2026 it launched Circeus as an AI-native holding company, alongside new equity financing, reporting 18 acquisitions over four years, more than 200,000 businesses served, more than $120 million of equity and more than $220 million in total capital. Gramondi is named in that announcement as Founder and COO, arguing that “evolving a product into its AI-native form can drive a step-change in the market it can address.” He also writes on AI in e-commerce operations for Practical Ecommerce.

Education

Luiss Guido Carli University

Bachelor’s degree, cum laude, Economics and Management

ESCP Business School

Master in Management

Bayes Business School, London

Master’s in International Management