Exclusive: Stella & Dot Founder Raises $5M For Her Next Act, AI Marketing Startup Marklo

While pregnant with her first child and employed at Dell, Jessica Herrin began testing jewelry trunk shows in Austin during her nights and weekends. That venture evolved into Stella & Dot, a company that generated over $2 billion in product sales via a network of independent sellers.

Two decades later, Herrin is tackling the marketing hurdles she faced during that journey. In 2025, she launched Marklo to assist consumer brands in determining which products to advertise and in preparing their promotional campaigns. The startup has successfully secured $5 million in a seed funding round, according to an exclusive statement shared with Crunchbase News.

Forerunner spearheaded the round, with participation from Freestyle Capital and angel investors that include figures from Klaviyo and current leaders at Shopify.

Marklo aids consumer brands in strategizing marketing campaigns by leveraging their sales, inventory, and historical marketing data. Its platform highlights past promotions that successfully drove sales, recommends subsequent products to feature, and uses artificial intelligence to draft campaign briefs and manage tasks.

Although Marklo remains pre-revenue, Herrin reports that over 100 brands are already utilizing the software via a pilot program. Participants include Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers.

Headquartered in Burlingame, California, the company is now releasing its software to the general public 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 figure out what items to highlight next, marketers must first comprehend what fueled previous sales. This task can prove difficult when sales figures, inventory metrics, and marketing histories reside across disparate systems.

Marklo aggregates this data from Shopify and platforms such as Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, and Google, organizing past product launches, promotions, and sales onto a unified calendar. Teams can readily observe, for instance, if an uptick in revenue credited to paid ads coincided with a new product drop or a widely circulated social media post—connections that might otherwise go unnoticed when evaluating each platform individually, Herrin noted. From there, Marklo can generate a campaign outline alongside actionable tasks for the team to review, revise, and delegate.

Using these consolidated records, alongside competitor promotions and prevailing social media trends, Marklo proposes what a brand ought to market next. It factors in both current stock levels and optimal timing for running the promotion.

Teams can subsequently leverage the platform to map out campaigns, draft promotional materials, and assign responsibilities, with suggested campaigns and reports delivered directly via Slack or email.

Herrin noted that her frustration with other AI tools stemmed from their lack of a broader contextual picture. For example, a standard tool might flag a past Fourth of July sale as a triumphant promotion and recommend running it again.

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

In another instance, Herrin shared how Marklo spotted a color trending on social media along with a matching handbag that a retailer had in inventory but had neglected to promote recently. The software then offered to draft a post modeled after previous high-performing content.

Latico Leathers serves as another illustration of how brands utilize Marklo. According to Herrin, the company used the software to map out an entire month of marketing in a single day—a workflow that previously consumed the majority of a week through endless meetings, spreadsheets, and five different tools.

Ultimately, humans retain control by reviewing and approving Marklo’s suggestions. The company emphasizes that it does not utilize customer data to train its artificial intelligence models.

Regarding its monetization strategy, Marklo intends to implement a monthly subscription model, supplemented by usage-based fees. At present, brands can install and test the system at no cost.

“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 emerged from a shift in how Herrin viewed the future of Stella & Dot.

The enterprise originally started as an avenue for women to earn income on flexible schedules by hosting home-based trunk shows. It eventually branched into apparel and skincare, distributing more than $500 million in earnings to its sellers, noted Herrin.

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

When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person gatherings, business plummeted by 80% almost instantaneously. Furthermore, Herrin recognized that women who might have once signed up to sell Stella & Dot products now had alternative avenues, such as promoting multiple brands as influencers or launching independent Shopify stores.

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

Rather than attempt to resurrect the previous model, Herrin chose to sell the businesses and brands separately. Later on, she repurchased the Stella & Dot brand to distribute through a different channel and trial Marklo.

She was also reevaluating her professional ambitions. Nearing her 50th birthday, Herrin questioned if she would willingly start the exact same business over again.

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

Her underlying desire to empower people to build businesses remained intact. The change lay in the specific problem she aimed to solve: Launching an ecommerce store had become simpler, yet managing its marketing still required pulling data from numerous platforms and coordinating subsequent campaigns.

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

A return to venture capital

For Marklo, Herrin also opted to reengage with venture backing after previously relying more heavily on organic profits to scale Stella & Dot.

Although she raised venture capital for her initial startup, which became WeddingChannel.com, she came away feeling that the venture had raised an excess of capital. She pivoted her strategy for Stella & Dot, launching it with approximately $2 million in capital while prioritizing sustained profitability.

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

With Marklo, however, she aimed to onboard engineers and accelerate software development. Its 11-person team incorporates software engineers with past experience at Shopify and Google. She likewise sought out investors boasting deep commerce expertise.

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

Experience as ‘the customer she’s building for’

Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, highlighted Herrin’s background in building Stella & Dot as a primary catalyst 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 informed Crunchbase News during an interview. That deep operational background grants Herrin firsthand insight into where teams waste time, which choices impact profit margins, and what brands require before placing trust in novel technologies, she added.

While AI generally lowers the barrier to generating marketing content, Green views a much greater opportunity in helping brands strategically decide what items to promote, assessing the direct impact on margins, and growing in alignment with their core identity. Marklo, she explained, supplies the necessary business judgment to transform raw data into actionable recommendations.

This development arrives as AI claims an expanding share of total investment within the broader sales and marketing sectors. Startups operating in sales, marketing, and customer relationship management secured $7.5 billion across 830 rounds globally this year through mid-September, with the majority of funding directed toward enterprises classified under Crunchbase’s AI categories. Overall funding is tracking below the $11.1 billion recorded in 2025, while deal volume is poised to decline for the fourth consecutive year—indicating that investors are concentrating larger bets onto a smaller pool 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 additionally pointed to Marklo’s capacity to serve businesses at varying stages of maturity, emphasizing that operational coordination grows increasingly complex and information more difficult to distribute as brands scale. Consequently, software capable of evolving alongside its user base served as another compelling draw.

Green noted she also appreciated Herrin’s approach of building Marklo in tandem with active brand users, supplying the young company with valuable customer feedback prior to its broader rollout.

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

?Frequently Asked Questions

01What is Marklo?

Marklo is an AI-powered marketing startup founded by Stella & Dot creator Jessica Herrin in 2025. It helps consumer brands plan campaigns, decide which products to promote, draft campaign briefs, and organize tasks.

02How much funding has Marklo raised?

The startup has raised $5 million in seed funding in a round led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Freestyle Capital and angel investors from Klaviyo and Shopify.

03Who is Marklo designed for?

Marklo is built for consumer brands and Shopify merchants of various sizes to help them streamline their marketing operations and data.

04Does Marklo use customer data to train AI models?

No, the company states that it does not use customer data to train its artificial intelligence models.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman