More than two decades after launching her landmark jewelry and apparel venture while pregnant and working at Dell, serial entrepreneur Jessica Herrin is returning to the startup ecosystem with a fresh solution for a familiar pain point. Herrin has quietly launched Marklo, an artificial intelligence-powered marketing platform designed to help consumer brands navigate the complex web of campaign planning, product selection, and cross-channel data analysis. The Burlingame, California-based startup has officially announced that it has raised $5 million in seed funding in an exclusive disclosure to Crunchbase News.
The seed round was led by prominent venture firm Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Freestyle Capital and an influential roster of angel investors that includes former executives from Klaviyo and current leaders from Shopify. Marklo enters the market as artificial intelligence captures an increasingly significant share of venture capital investment within the broader sales, marketing, and customer relationship management sectors. According to Crunchbase data, startups in these categories have drawn billions in global funding, though investors are concentrating their capital into fewer, highly strategic operations as deal volumes continue to shift.
Herrin’s journey toward founding Marklo in 2025 stems directly from the marketing hurdles she faced while building Stella & Dot into a retail powerhouse that ultimately sold more than $2 billion in products through a vast network of independent sellers. Her initial enterprise began humbly as evening and weekend jewelry trunk shows in Austin, Texas. Over time, the business expanded into apparel and skincare, paying out more than $500 million to its community of independent sellers before pandemic disruptions and shifting market dynamics altered the landscape.
When COVID-19 brought in-home social gatherings to a sudden halt, Stella & Dot experienced an immediate eighty percent drop in business. Simultaneously, the rise of digital influence and accessible e-commerce tools meant that prospective sellers suddenly had alternative avenues, such as promoting multiple independent brands or launching standalone Shopify storefronts. Reflecting on the period, Herrin famously described the company as a "COVID victim that had pre-existing conditions." Rather than attempting to resuscitate the legacy direct-sales model, she sold the underlying businesses and brands separately, later reacquiring the core Stella & Dot brand to test new channels and trial Marklo’s early software concepts.
As she approached her 50th birthday, Herrin evaluated her next professional chapter with a profound realization about entrepreneurship. "As an entrepreneur, you don’t just start a business; you start a life," she noted. While her fundamental mission remained unchanged—empowering operators to build successful businesses—the underlying market problem had evolved. Launching an online storefront had never been easier, but coordinating and executing effective marketing strategies still required stitching together fragmented data from a multitude of disconnected software systems.
Planning Campaigns
To solve this friction, Marklo is designed to ingest and unify fragmented data streams that typically live in separate silos. Consumer brands frequently struggle to evaluate past marketing performance because sales metrics, inventory levels, and historical marketing records are scattered across disparate platforms. Marklo bridges these gaps by drawing information directly from Shopify alongside marketing services such as Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, and Google, consolidating past launches, promotional activities, and revenue metrics into a single, cohesive calendar interface.
Through this centralized view, marketing teams can easily identify correlations that might otherwise remain hidden when reviewing individual software dashboards. For instance, teams can instantly verify whether a surge in paid advertising revenue coincided with a new product introduction or an organic social media post. By processing these comprehensive operational records alongside broader social media trends and competitor promotions, Marklo’s AI engine intelligently suggests which specific products a brand should market next, factoring in real-time inventory availability and ideal promotional timing.
Furthermore, the software assists teams by drafting comprehensive campaign briefs, outlining strategic plans, and automatically organizing associated operational tasks. Summaries, suggested campaigns, and analytical reports can also be delivered directly through collaborative communication channels like Slack or email. Herrin emphasizes that a core frustration with generic AI tools on the market has been their lack of broader business context. Standard tools might recognize a past Fourth of July holiday sale as a successful promotion and recommend repeating it blindly, ignoring inventory constraints or seasonal realities.
Marklo is engineered to incorporate the practical judgment and contextual awareness required to turn raw data into actionable retail strategy. In one illustrative use case, the platform identified a specific color trending across social media channels alongside a matching handbag that a retailer had sitting in inventory but had not actively promoted in recent months. The software promptly drafted a promotional plan modeled after a historical high-performing post. Similarly, apparel and leather goods brand Latico Leathers utilized Marklo to successfully plan an entire month’s worth of marketing activities in just a single day—a collaborative workflow that previously consumed the better part of a week across multiple team meetings, disjointed spreadsheets, and five different software applications.
Despite its advanced automation capabilities, Marklo relies on human oversight, ensuring that marketing teams review, edit, and approve all proposed work before launch. The company explicitly maintains that customer data is never utilized to train underlying AI models. Regarding its business model, Marklo plans to implement a monthly subscription fee supplemented by usage-based charges. Ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season, the company is opening its platform to the public, offering brands a free trial period to install and test the software.
"I’m very passionate about small and medium businesses, and I want to make it accessible to every single brand that runs on Shopify," Herrin explained in an interview, "so that they can operate like a big brand."
A Return to Venture Capital
Marklo’s path to funding marks a distinct shift in Herrin’s financial strategy compared to her tenure at Stella & Dot. While she raised early venture capital for her very first enterprise—which evolved into WeddingChannel.com—she ultimately felt that startup had raised an excessive amount of capital. For Stella & Dot, she deliberately pivoted to a lean model, building the company with roughly $2 million in initial capital and prioritizing organic profitability over rapid cash burn.
With Marklo, however, Herrin recognized the necessity of accelerating engineering development and scaling the product much faster. The startup’s eleven-person team already includes specialized engineers recruited from tech giants like Shopify and Google. Beyond securing financial runway, Herrin intentionally sought out venture partners who brought deep domain expertise in commerce and retail technology, viewing the funding round as an opportunity to assemble an elite brain trust.
Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, noted that Herrin’s extensive background as a multi-stage operator was the primary catalyst for backing Marklo. Green pointed out that Herrin has uniquely lived the exact experience of the customers she is building for, having navigated every phase from launching a brand from scratch to scaling operations internationally. That foundational experience grants Herrin firsthand insight into where marketing teams lose valuable time, which operational decisions directly impact profit margins, and what safeguards brands require before they can safely place trust in emerging automation technologies.
Green highlighted that while generative AI has commoditized the production of marketing content, the far greater strategic opportunity lies in helping brands determine what to promote, understanding the ultimate financial impact on margins, and growing in ways that remain faithful to a brand’s unique identity. Marklo bridges that gap by embedding the nuanced human judgment necessary to transform raw business analytics into reliable recommendations. Furthermore, Green praised Herrin’s pragmatic approach of building and refining the software alongside real brands participating in an active pilot program, ensuring the product was rigorously tested in the field before its broader commercial debut.
With more than 100 consumer brands already participating in its software pilot—including established names such as Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers—Marklo is well-positioned as it opens its platform to the broader market. As the Burlingame-based startup channels its newly acquired seed capital into expanding its engineering talent, refining product features, and scaling customer support, Herrin continues to apply her decades of retail wisdom toward solving the operational bottlenecks of modern e-commerce.
