Stella & Dot Founder Secures $5M for AI Marketing Startup Marklo

Stella & Dot founder Jessica Herrin has launched Marklo, an AI-powered marketing startup that recently secured $5 million in seed funding. The platform helps consumer brands analyze sales data and plan promotional campaigns.

Tran ThiOctober 14, 20268 min read

While pregnant with her first child and working at Dell, Jessica Herrin began experimenting with jewelry trunk shows in Austin during her nights and weekends. That early venture evolved into Stella & Dot, an enterprise that generated over $2 billion in sales via a vast community of independent sellers.

Two decades later, Herrin is tackling the marketing hurdles she faced during those years. She launched Marklo in 2025 to assist consumer brands in determining which merchandise to spotlight and in orchestrating their promotional efforts. The startup has successfully secured $5 million in seed funding, according to exclusive information shared with Crunchbase News.

Jessica Herrin, CEO and founder of Marklo AI. (Courtesy photo)

Forerunner spearheaded the financing round, with participation from Freestyle Capital as well as angel investors that include former Klaviyo executives and current Shopify leaders.

Marklo aids consumer brands in strategizing marketing initiatives by leveraging their historical sales figures, inventory levels, and previous promotional data. The platform highlights past promotions that successfully drove revenue, recommends subsequent items to advertise, and utilizes artificial intelligence to generate campaign briefs and manage tasks.

Although Marklo remains pre-revenue, upwards of 100 brands are actively testing the software through a pilot program, as reported by Herrin. Among these participating brands are Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers.

Based in Burlingame, California, the enterprise is opening access to its software for the general public just ahead of the holiday shopping season. The fresh capital will be directed toward hiring engineers, advancing product development, and scaling customer support.

Planning campaigns

To pinpoint future promotional strategies, marketers must first comprehend what fueled prior sales. This task can prove difficult when revenue records, inventory logs, and marketing histories reside across isolated platforms.

Marklo aggregates this data from Shopify and tools such as Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, and Google, consolidating past product launches, promotions, and sales figures into a unified calendar. Teams can readily observe, for instance, whether an uptick in ad-driven sales coincided with a new product debut or a viral social media mention—connections that might otherwise go unnoticed when evaluating each service independently, Herrin noted. From there, Marklo formulates a campaign strategy and generates corresponding assignments for team members to review, edit, and delegate.

Using these insights alongside competitor campaigns and social media trends, Marklo proposes what a brand ought to feature next. The system also accounts for current inventory levels and optimal scheduling windows for promotions.

Teams can subsequently leverage the software to map out campaigns, draft promotional assets, and assign responsibilities, with recommended campaigns and performance reports delivered directly through Slack or email.

Herrin voiced frustration regarding the shortage of broad-context awareness in other AI tools. For example, a standard tool might recognize a past Fourth of July promotion as successful and advise replicating it blindly.

“Hey, no, I can’t. It’s not Fourth of July. We don’t have the inventory anymore,” she recalled thinking.

Illustrating a successful use case, Herrin explained how Marklo identified a color trending on social media alongside a matching handbag that a retailer currently had in stock but had not recently promoted. The system then offered to draft a post modeled after a previous high-performing template.

Latico Leathers offers another prime example of how brands utilize Marklo. The company used the application to map out an entire month of marketing in just one day—a workflow that previously consumed the better part of a week across multiple meetings, spreadsheets, and five distinct tools, according to Herrin.

Ultimately, human team members review and authorize all work proposed by Marklo. The company maintains a strict policy against utilizing customer data for training AI models.

Regarding its monetization strategy, Marklo intends to implement a monthly subscription fee alongside usage-based charges. At present, brands can install and test the platform free of charge.

“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 told Crunchbase News in an interview, “so that they can operate like a big brand.”

A change of direction

The impetus to build Marklo stemmed from a shift in how Herrin evaluated the long-term trajectory of Stella & Dot.

That enterprise originated as an avenue for women to earn income on flexible schedules by hosting home-based trunk shows. It eventually expanded into apparel and skincare lines, distributing over $500 million to its seller network, per Herrin.

“For me, it was never about the jewelry,” she told Crunchbase News.

When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person gatherings, revenue plummeted by 80% almost overnight. Herrin also recognized that prospective sellers who once turned to Stella & Dot now had alternative paths, such as promoting multiple brands as influencers or launching independent Shopify storefronts.

She characterized Stella & Dot as “the COVID victim that had pre-existing conditions.”

Rather than attempt to resurrect the legacy framework, Herrin sold the constituent businesses and brands separately. She later repurchased the Stella & Dot brand name to distribute products through an alternative channel and serve as a testing ground for Marklo.

Simultaneously, she re-evaluated her professional future. Nearing her 50th birthday, Herrin pondered whether she would choose to launch the exact same venture over again.

“As an entrepreneur, you don’t just start a business; you start a life,” she said.

Her desire to empower people in building businesses remained unchanged. What shifted was the specific friction point she wanted to resolve: while establishing an online storefront had grown simpler, managing its marketing still required consolidating data from a multitude of disconnected systems to coordinate the next push.

“The mission was the same, but the solution needed to evolve,” Herrin said.

A return to venture capital

For Marklo, Herrin opted to re-engage with venture capital, moving away from the purely profit-funded growth model she favored for Stella & Dot.

Although she had raised venture funding for her very first startup—which became WeddingChannel.com—she concluded at the time that the company had taken on an excess of capital. She pursued the opposite strategy with Stella & Dot, launching it with roughly $2 million and maintaining a strict focus on profitability.

“Here’s a new growth strategy,” Herrin recalled thinking. “How about profits?”

With Marklo, she aimed to onboard engineers and accelerate software development. The 11-person team incorporates engineering talent formerly employed by Shopify and Google. She also sought out investors possessing deep commerce expertise.

“Raising capital isn’t just about having money for expenses,” Herrin said. “It’s about bringing a brain trust together.”

Experience as ‘the customer she’s building for’

Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, noted that Herrin’s extensive background building Stella & Dot was a primary driver behind backing Marklo.

“Jessica uniquely has been the customer that she’s building for right now at every stage, from starting a brand to having a brand at scale,” Green told Crunchbase News in an interview. That background grants Herrin firsthand awareness of where teams waste hours, which operational decisions directly impact profit margins, and what brands require before placing trust in novel technologies, she added.

While generative AI broadly simplifies the creation of marketing content, Green views the more significant opportunity in assisting brands to determine precisely what to promote, understanding the margin implications, and scaling sustainably in alignment with brand identity. Marklo, she noted, incorporates the vital judgment necessary to transform raw business data into actionable guidance.

This development arrives as AI captures an increasing share of investment within the broader sales and marketing sector. Enterprises operating in sales, marketing, and CRM raised $7.5 billion across 830 global rounds this year through mid-September, with the majority flowing into Crunchbase’s AI-related categories. Funding tracks below the 2025 total of $11.1 billion, while transaction volumes risk declining for a fourth consecutive year—signaling that investors are concentrating capital among a select group of companies.

“It’s one thing to collect the information; it’s another thing to understand how to present it and how to recommend an action against it,” Green added.

The investor also highlighted Marklo’s capacity to serve businesses at varying developmental stages, observing that coordination grows increasingly intricate and data sharing more challenging as brands scale. Consequently, the prospect of software capable of growing alongside its customer base served as an additional selling point.

Green also praised Herrin’s proactive choice to refine Marklo in tandem with active brand users, providing invaluable customer feedback ahead of the public rollout.

“I like the fact that she built this product while it was being used,” she said.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is Marklo? Marklo is an AI-powered marketing startup founded by Jessica Herrin in 2025 that helps consumer brands plan campaigns, analyze past sales data, and determine what products to promote next.
How much funding has Marklo raised? Marklo has raised $5 million in seed funding in a round led by Forerunner, with participation from Freestyle Capital and various angel investors.
Who is Marklo designed for? The software is built for consumer brands, particularly those running on Shopify, ranging from emerging businesses to established retailers.
Does Marklo use customer data to train its AI? No, the company states that it does not use customer data to train its underlying AI models.