Decades after launching her jewelry venture Stella & Dot from her living room while pregnant and working at Dell, serial entrepreneur Jessica Herrin is tackling a completely different challenge: the fragmented marketing infrastructure that frustrates modern consumer brands.
Herrin has launched Marklo, an artificial intelligence startup designed to help brands solve complex promotional decisions, coordinate cross-channel campaigns, and streamline their marketing workflows. The Burlingame, California-based company has officially announced that it has raised $5 million in seed funding. Forerunner led the financing round, with participation from Freestyle Capital and notable angel investors, including prominent leaders from Klaviyo and Shopify.
While Marklo remains pre-revenue as it prepares to open its software to the general public ahead of the holiday shopping season, it has already gained significant traction. More than 100 established consumer brands—including Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers—have been actively testing the platform through an extensive pilot program. The newly secured capital will be deployed primarily to expand the startup’s 11-person engineering team, accelerate product development, and scale up customer support operations.
Planning Campaigns
The genesis of Marklo stems directly from the operational hurdles Herrin encountered throughout her extensive entrepreneurial career. To decide effectively what products to promote next, modern marketers must first evaluate what drove previous sales. However, this diagnostic process frequently proves arduous because sales records, inventory databases, and marketing platforms typically operate in complete isolation from one another.
Marklo bridges this gap by aggregating data from Shopify alongside specialized services like Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, and Google, consolidating past launches, promotions, and sales figures into a unified calendar. This integrated view allows marketing teams to analyze critical correlations that are often obscured when evaluating each channel individually. For instance, teams can easily determine whether a sudden spike in paid advertising revenue coincided organically with a new product release or a viral social media post. Once the software analyzes these patterns, it can draft comprehensive campaign strategies and generate actionable tasks for team review, editing, and assignment.
Leveraging these historical records, competitor promotional tracking, and emerging social media trends, Marklo intelligently recommends optimal product choices for upcoming marketing pushes. Crucially, the platform accounts for real-time inventory levels and optimal timing schedules before proposing campaigns. From there, teams can utilize the software to map out strategies, draft marketing copy, and delegate responsibilities, with curated campaign proposals and analytics delivered directly via Slack or email.
Herrin noted that her initial frustration with existing AI marketing tools stemmed from their lack of broad contextual awareness. Traditional AI models might observe that a past Fourth of July sale performed exceptionally well and consequently suggest repeating the promotion blindly, ignoring critical real-world constraints. In response to such suggestions, she noted the absurdity of attempting to execute promotions out of season or without adequate stock.
By contrast, Marklo operates with deep contextual understanding. In one practical scenario cited by Herrin, the platform identified a specific color trending across social media channels alongside a matching handbag that a retailer currently had in stock but had neglected to promote recently. The software then proactively drafted a promotional post modeled after a previous high-performing asset.
For brands like Latico Leathers, the operational impact has been substantial. The leather goods company successfully utilized Marklo to plan an entire month’s worth of marketing collateral in a single day—a collaborative workflow that previously consumed the better part of a week across multiple planning meetings, disparate spreadsheets, and at least five distinct software tools.
Despite its automated capabilities, Marklo relies on human oversight, ensuring that marketing teams ultimately review and approve all proposed content and strategies. Furthermore, the company maintains a strict privacy policy, explicitly refusing to utilize proprietary customer data to train underlying AI models.
Regarding its commercial model, Marklo plans to implement a subscription-based pricing structure supplemented by usage fees. During its current rollout phase, however, brands can install and evaluate the software free of charge. Herrin emphasized her long-standing commitment to smaller enterprises, expressing her desire to make sophisticated operational tools accessible to every independent brand operating on Shopify so they can scale and compete effectively like major retail corporations.
A Change of Direction
The decision to establish Marklo followed a profound reassessment of Stella & Dot’s future trajectory. Originally conceived as a flexible economic opportunity for women to host in-home jewelry trunk shows, Stella & Dot eventually expanded into apparel and skincare, ultimately distributing more than $500 million in commissions to its network of independent sellers. Reflecting on her tenure, Herrin noted that her core motivation was never simply about selling jewelry, but rather about empowering individuals to build flexible businesses.
However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted in-home gatherings, causing the company’s revenue to drop by roughly 80% almost overnight. Concurrently, Herrin recognized that the broader retail landscape had shifted dramatically. Women who might have once joined Stella & Dot as independent sellers now had vastly different avenues available to them, ranging from partnering with multiple brands as digital influencers to launching direct-to-consumer storefronts independently via Shopify. She candidly characterized Stella & Dot as a victim of the pandemic that suffered from pre-existing structural conditions.
rather than attempting to revive the legacy business model, Herrin opted to divest the brands separately. She later repurchased the core Stella & Dot brand to distribute it through alternative channels while simultaneously utilizing it as a testing ground for Marklo. Approaching her 50th birthday, she began re-evaluating her professional aspirations and questioning whether she would choose to build the exact same enterprise if given a clean slate.
Recognizing that entrepreneurship involves shaping an entire lifestyle rather than merely launching a company, she remained steadfast in her mission to empower business builders. The fundamental mission had not changed, but the technological solution required an evolution. While opening an online storefront had become remarkably frictionless over the years, managing cross-channel marketing coordination and synthesizing fragmented data systems remained a persistent bottleneck.
A Return to Venture Capital
In building Marklo, Herrin adopted a financing strategy distinct from her approach with Stella & Dot. While she had raised early institutional capital for her very first venture—which evolved into WeddingChannel.com—she ultimately felt that enterprise had accepted excessive funding. Consequently, she built Stella & Dot with roughly $2 million in capital, prioritizing immediate profitability and organic growth.
For Marklo, however, accelerating product development and rapidly expanding the engineering workforce necessitated a return to venture backing. The startup’s 11-person team includes engineering talent recruited directly from companies like Shopify and Google. Beyond financial capital, Herrin deliberately sought investors with deep domain expertise in commerce technology.
Experience as ‘The Customer She’s Building For’
Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, pointed to Herrin’s extensive operational background as the primary catalyst for backing Marklo. Having navigated every conceivable phase of brand development—from bootstrapping a nascent startup to scaling a major enterprise—Herrin possesses firsthand insight into where operational teams lose productivity, which decisions dictate profitability, and what requirements brands demand before placing trust in emerging enterprise software.
Green observed that while generative AI has simplified the mechanics of producing marketing content, the far greater commercial opportunity lies in helping brands determine precisely what products deserve promotional focus, evaluating the direct impact on profit margins, and driving growth aligned with brand identity. Marklo successfully incorporates the nuanced human judgment required to translate raw business metrics into actionable commercial strategies.
This investment arrives amid a broader investment landscape where artificial intelligence continues to command an expanding share of venture capital within the sales, marketing, and customer relationship management sectors. According to Crunchbase data, startups in these categories attracted $7.5 billion across 830 global funding rounds through mid-September, with the vast majority of capital flowing into AI-focused enterprises. While overall funding totals remain slightly below previous historical highs, investor conviction continues to concentrate strategically within high-potential category leaders.
Green also commended Herrin’s pragmatic approach of co-developing Marklo alongside early-adopting brands to secure rigorous, real-world customer feedback prior to a wider commercial release. The ability of the software to scale alongside growing businesses, easing the inherent communication and coordination complexities that emerge as brands expand, represents a powerful draw for both investors and future enterprise clients.
