Built to Move: How Grounded is Customizing Commerce on Wheels

We live in a world addicted to speed and personalization. If a pipe breaks below your sink, the average consumer will most likely go to friends or online and find the quickest plumber to get to the house. The same goes for if you chip a tooth: How quickly can you get to a dentist? Or if your dog gets skunked: How quickly can we get a dog groomer?

Quickest often means someone coming to you, not the other way around. This shift in behavior is reflected in the data: over the past 10 years, commercial vehicle registrations have surged while passenger car registrations have declined. Multiple factors contribute to this trend—Uber, remote work, shifting lifestyles, and the growing demand for on-demand convenience—all reshaping the transportation landscape.

Once a commercial vehicle is purchased, the real challenge begins: upfitting it to meet your business’s specific needs. Unless you’re Amazon or FedEx ordering fleets of 5,000+, it’s nearly impossible to get a GM, Ram, or Mercedes to build something custom.

That’s where Grounded comes in. Grounded upfits Class B electric vans with a modular block system that allows each build to be fully customized, whether for dentistry, food trucks, pet grooming, mobile offices, or a standard RV. Just like cars can be customized with trims and features, Grounded has built a similar experience for commercial vans—you can test out their configurator and read more about it here.

The magic lies in their approach to mass customization at scale: a standardized core structure but modular interiors that flex to serve dozens of use cases. This lowers cost, shrinks lead times, and tailors each unit for the specific customer without reinventing the wheel.

Grounded builds these vehicles in all-electric vans and offers business owners a faster, more capital-efficient way to grow than a brick-and-mortar location, no lease, less labor, no long wait, and full flexibility. For consumers, it means getting what they need, where they need it, faster than ever. When your child chips a tooth, the dentist comes to you. When your dog gets skunked, the groomer pulls into your driveway.

Sam Shapiro, Grounded’s founder and CEO, started the company out of personal need, wanting to work remotely on the road. A former SpaceX engineer, product lead at TripleLift, and NBA fan, Sam turned a DIY van build into a scalable platform. Ask him for photos of the first van he built for a road trip to Colorado-it’s wild how far things have come in under two years.

What began as a remote-work solution is now part of a much bigger shift: where services come to you, businesses operate without storefronts, and mobility becomes the infrastructure of modern commerce.

Grounded isn’t just building vans—they’re building the future of how and where business gets done.