Marklo, an AI-powered marketing startup founded by serial entrepreneur Jessica Herrin, has raised $5 million in seed funding to help Shopify brands plan and execute marketing campaigns more efficiently.
The funding round was led by Forerunner, with participation from Freestyle Capital. The company has also opened its public beta as online retailers prepare for the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday shopping season.
Marklo is building an AI marketing platform that helps brands decide what products to promote, which customers to target, and when to launch campaigns. The platform analyzes business data and market trends to identify potential revenue opportunities and prepare marketing work for teams to review and approve.
“Every tool in a brand’s stack is getting AI, but each one only sees its own corner of the business,” said Herrin, founder and CEO of Marklo. “Great merchants don’t work that way. You can’t decide what to market next without knowing what sold, what’s in stock, what you’ve already promoted, what’s coming — and what the rest of your category is doing. Marklo sees all of it, spots the next opportunity and gets the work moving.”
The platform connects with tools like Shopify, Klaviyo Attentive, Meta, Google, Slack, Canva and Figma. It pulls in sales data, inventory info, past campaign history, assets and marketing results all into one place. This helps teams see what worked before and use that insight to plan their moves. Having everything, in one spot makes it easier to stay on the page and make smarter decisions.
Marklo can also create marketing calendars, campaign briefs, content, task lists, and reports. Its AI reviews sales performance, available inventory, upcoming promotions, competitor activity, and social media trends to recommend what brands should market next.
“We already had Shopify, Klaviyo and analytics tools. What was missing was one place that connected all of our marketing campaigns, inventory and sales data,” said Allison Plaisance, Senior Director of Retention Marketing at Away. “Marklo gives us the whole commercial picture and an actionable path forward.”
“One of the most pervasive shifts in startup formation over the past few years is leaner teams doing more with less. Intelligence changed the equation for how builders can bring products to life, and market and scale them,” said Kirsten Green, Founding Partner at Forerunner. “Consumer brands are some of the businesses that stand to benefit from this most. Jessica understands this opportunity deeply, as she spent 20 years building breakout brands and is a genuine expert on how AI can better drive and accelerate the marketing funnel.”
Unlike AI tools focused on a single marketing channel, Marklo aims to coordinate activities across email, SMS, paid advertising, social media, and other marketing channels. Marketers remain in control and can review, edit, assign, and approve the work before campaigns are launched.
The company says early customers include Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers. According to Marklo, Latico Leathers used the platform to plan a full month of marketing in one day, replacing a process that previously took most of a week.
“Most brands are running cross-channel marketing out of a patchwork of spreadsheets, decks and ten different logins,” said Herrin. “I’ve been lucky to build with great merchandising, creative and business intelligence teams — and even then, the hardest part was getting everyone working from the same picture. Marklo gives every marketer that picture and does the assembly work around it, whether the team is two people or twenty, so they can make smarter decisions, move faster and stop leaving revenue and margin on the table.”
Jessica Herrin founded Marklo after building Stella & Dot Brands into a social-selling business that sold more than $2 billion in products. Her experience in direct-to-consumer commerce informs Marklo’s focus on helping growing brands manage increasingly complex marketing operations with lean teams.
The startup will use the new funding to expand its product and engineering teams, grow its public beta, and invest in customer success and community programs. Marklo also says customer data remains private and is not used to train AI models.
