Jessica Herrin was pregnant with her first child and working at Dell when she began testing jewelry trunk shows in Austin on nights and weekends. The venture became Stella & Dot, a business that sold more than $2 billion in products through a network of independent sellers.
Two decades later, Herrin is building a business around the marketing problems she encountered along the way. She started Marklo in 2025 to help consumer brands decide which products to promote and prepare their campaigns. The startup has now raised $5 million in seed funding, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Forerunner led the round, joined by Freestyle Capital and angel investors including former Klaviyo and current Shopify leaders.
Marklo helps consumer brands plan marketing campaigns using their sales, inventory and past marketing data. Its software shows which promotions drove sales, suggests what products to promote next and uses AI to draft campaign briefs and organize tasks.
While Marklo is still pre-revenue, more than 100 brands are already using its software in a pilot, according to Herrin. Those brands include Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner and Latico Leathers.
The Burlingame, California-based company is now opening its software to the public ahead of the holiday shopping season. It plans to use its new funding to hire engineers, develop the product and expand customer support.
Planning campaigns
To decide what to promote next, marketers first need to understand what drove past sales. That can be a challenging endeavor when sales, inventory and marketing records all sit in separate systems.
Marklo collects that information from Shopify and services such as Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta and Google, then puts past launches, promotions and sales into a calendar. Teams can see, for example, whether a rise in sales attributed to paid advertising coincided with a new product launch or a widely shared social post — factors they might miss when reviewing each service separately, Herrin said. Marklo can then draft a campaign plan and create related tasks for the team to review, edit and assign.
Using those records, along with competitors’ promotions and social media trends, Marklo suggests what a brand should market next. It also considers what the retailer has in stock and when a promotion would run.
From there, teams can use the software to plan campaigns, draft marketing materials and assign work, with suggested campaigns and reports also delivered through Slack or email.
Herrin said the lack of broader-picture context with other AI tools frustrated her. For example, a tool might identify a Fourth of July sale as a successful promotion and suggest repeating it.
“Hey, no, I can’t. It’s not Fourth of July. We don’t have the inventory anymore,” she recalled thinking.
In one case, Herrin described how Marklo identified a color trending on social media and a matching handbag a retailer had in stock but hadn’t promoted recently. It offered to plan a post based on one that had performed well before.
Latico Leathers offers another example of how a brand uses Marklo. The company used the software to plan a month’s worth of marketing in one day, a process that had previously taken most of a week across meetings, spreadsheets and five tools, according to Herrin.
In the end, humans review and approve Marklo’s proposed work. The company says it does not use customer data to train AI models.
As for its revenue model, Marklo plans to charge a monthly subscription fee, with additional charges based on usage. For now, brands can install and try it for free.
“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 decision to build Marklo followed a change in how Herrin thought about Stella & Dot’s future.
That company began as a way for women to earn money on their own schedules by hosting trunk shows in their own homes. It expanded into apparel and skincare and paid out more than $500 million to its sellers, Herrin said.
“For me, it was never about the jewelry,” she told Crunchbase News.
When COVID-19 put a stop to in-home gatherings, business dropped 80% almost overnight. Herrin also realized that women who might once have signed up to sell Stella & Dot products suddenly had other options. They could promote multiple brands as influencers or open their own Shopify stores.
She described Stella & Dot as “the COVID victim that had pre-existing conditions.”
Rather than rebuild the old model, Herrin sold the businesses and brands separately. Later, she bought back the Stella & Dot brand to sell through a different channel and test Marklo.
She was also reconsidering what she wanted to do next. As she approached her 50th birthday, Herrin questioned whether she would choose to start the same business again.
“As an entrepreneur, you don’t just start a business; you start a life,” she said.
She still wanted to help people build businesses. What had changed was the problem she wanted to solve: Opening an online store had become easier, but managing its marketing still meant gathering information from several systems and coordinating the next campaign.
“The mission was the same, but the solution needed to evolve,” Herrin said.
A return to venture capital
For Marklo, Herrin also returned to venture funding after relying more on profits to grow Stella & Dot.
She had raised venture capital for her first company, which became WeddingChannel.com, but came away feeling that it had raised too much money. She took a different approach with Stella & Dot, building it with about $2 million in capital and a focus on profitability.
“Here’s a new growth strategy,” Herrin recalled thinking. “How about profits?”
With Marklo, she wanted to hire engineers and develop the software faster. Its 11-person team includes engineers who previously worked at Shopify and Google. She also sought investors with commerce experience.
“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, said Herrin’s experience building Stella & Dot was a central reason for 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 experience gives Herrin firsthand knowledge of where teams lose time, which decisions affect profitability and what brands need before trusting new technology, she added.
While AI in general makes it easier to produce marketing content, Green sees the greater opportunity in helping brands decide on what exactly to promote, as well as in understanding the impact on margins and how to grow in ways consistent with their identity. Marklo, she said, incorporates the judgment needed to turn business data into useful recommendations.
The opportunity comes as AI is taking a larger share of investment in the broader sales and marketing sector. Startups in sales, marketing and customer relationship management raised $7.5 billion across 830 rounds globally this year through mid-September, with most of that investment going to companies in Crunchbase’s AI-related categories. Funding is on pace to finish below 2025’s $11.1 billion, while deal volume could fall for a fourth straight year — a sign that investors are concentrating their bets in fewer 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 pointed to Marklo’s ability to serve businesses at different stages, noting that coordination becomes more complex and information harder to share as brands grow. As such, the prospect of software that can grow alongside its customers was another draw.
Green said she also valued Herrin’s decision to develop Marklo alongside brands already using it, giving the company customer feedback before its broader launch.
“I like the fact that she built this product while it was being used,” she said.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
