Marklo, an AI startup that plans marketing campaigns for consumer brands, has raised a $5 million seed round led by Forerunner Ventures, with Freestyle Capital and a group of angel investors — including former Klaviyo executives and a sitting Shopify executive — also participating. The round, reported this week by Crunchbase News and tracked by Value Add VC, comes as the company opens its product to the public ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Marklo's pitch rests heavily on the track record of its founder, Jessica Herrin, who built the direct-sales jewelry company Stella & Dot into a business with more than $2 billion in cumulative sales and over $500 million paid out to its network of independent sellers. Herrin had bootstrapped that company after an earlier venture-backed effort, the wedding registry site WeddingChannel.com. Stella & Dot's sales fell roughly 80% during the pandemic; Herrin later sold off its various brands before buying back the Stella & Dot name itself.
Betting on a founder more than a product
Herrin founded Marklo in 2025 and has built an 11-person team that includes engineers who previously worked at Shopify and Google. The software pulls sales, inventory and past marketing data from platforms including Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta and Google into a single calendar, which the company calls its "Hindsight Calendar", showing which past promotions actually drove sales. From there, the tool suggests and drafts upcoming campaigns, weighing stock levels, competitors' promotions and social-media trends, though every campaign requires human review before it ships. The company says it does not use customer data to train its models.
Marklo is still pre-revenue. More than 100 consumer brands — including Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner and Latico Leathers — are testing the product in pilot programs, but none has yet converted to a paying customer, according to the Value Add VC analysis. That makes the round, in large part, a wager on Herrin's experience building distribution for consumer brands rather than on evidence the product can scale. The company says it plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team, broaden its public beta and build out customer support ahead of peak season.
The deal lands amid a broader rush of venture money into AI tools for marketing and commerce: sales, marketing and CRM startups have raised roughly $7.5 billion globally across more than 830 rounds so far this year, with most of that capital flowing to AI-related companies.