Marklo has raised $5 million in Seed funding to expand its agentic marketing platform for commerce brands and has opened the product to public beta ahead of the holiday shopping season. The round was led by Forerunner, with participation from Freestyle Capital. Marklo plans to use the funding to grow its product and engineering teams, expand the public beta, and invest in customer success and community programs.
Marklo is built for brands operating on Shopify and is designed to answer a recurring question for marketing teams: what should the company market next? The platform analyzes a brand’s sales, inventory, campaign history, promotions, upcoming product plans, and creative assets alongside external signals such as competitor activity, social media trends, and broader category developments.
Based on that information, Marklo can recommend marketing opportunities and build the associated work for teams to review. This can include marketing calendars, campaign briefs, content, approval workflows, and team handoffs.
The platform connects with systems including Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, Google, Slack, Canva, and Figma. Marklo consolidates information from those tools into a shared environment covering products, inventory, promotions, campaigns, creative assets, and performance data.
Once installed, Marklo can reconstruct previous product launches, promotions, email and SMS campaigns, paid media activity, social marketing, and revenue into a day-by-day and year-over-year marketing calendar. Teams can then use their own historical information to ask questions about past performance, slow-moving inventory, or future campaign opportunities.
Marklo also periodically reviews sales, inventory, and planned campaigns and can send recommended campaigns and reports to teams through Slack or email. The company said marketers maintain control over what is edited, approved, and ultimately published.
Early customers include Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers. Latico Leathers used Marklo to plan a month of marketing in one day, replacing a process that previously required most of a week across meetings, spreadsheets, and multiple software tools.
Marklo was founded by Jessica Herrin, who previously built Stella & Dot Brands into a social-selling company that generated more than $2 billion in product sales. The broader Marklo team includes experience from Shopify, Google, Stanford, and direct-to-consumer brands.
The company’s public beta launches as Shopify merchants prepare for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the broader holiday sales period. Marklo said customer data remains private and is not used to train AI models.
KEY QUOTES:
“Every tool in a brand’s stack is getting AI, but each one only sees its own corner of the business. 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.”
Jessica Herrin, Founder And CEO Of Marklo
“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. Marklo gives us the whole commercial picture and an actionable path forward.”
Allison Plaisance, Senior Director Of Retention Marketing At Away
“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. 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.”
Kirsten Green, Founding Partner At Forerunner
“Most brands are running cross-channel marketing out of a patchwork of spreadsheets, decks and ten different logins. 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, Founder And CEO Of Marklo
