Startups

Marklo closes $5M seed and opens its public beta, pitching Shopify brands an AI that decides what to promote next

Jessica Herrin's second act launches ahead of Black Friday with a Forerunner-led round, more than 100 pilot brands, and a proactive campaign-prep model aimed at lean DTC teams.

By Giulia Donatello· Startups & funding·2026-10-14·3 min read

Marklo announced a $5 million seed round led by Forerunner on Tuesday and opened its public beta roughly two weeks before Black Friday, a launch window chosen for maximum pressure. Freestyle Capital joined the round, along with angel checks from current Shopify leaders and former Klaviyo operators. The timing isn’t incidental. If the thesis works, it has to work in the next six weeks.

Founder Jessica Herrin, who previously built Stella & Dot, is pitching Marklo as an agentic marketing platform for the five-to-thirty-person Shopify brand that can’t justify a CMO hire. The product reads sales, inventory, promotions, and historical marketing data, decides what the brand should promote next, and drafts cross-channel campaign briefs. Integrations span Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, Google, Canva, Figma, and Slack, with weekly reviews delivered through Slack or email. Humans still edit and approve the work.

“I’m very passionate about small and medium businesses, and I want to make it accessible to every single brand that runs on Shopify, so that they can operate like a big brand,” Herrin said.

More than 100 brands are in the pilot, including Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers. The company is pre-revenue. Pricing will combine a monthly subscription with usage-based charges; the beta is free to install.

The lone productivity data point comes from Latico Leathers, which Herrin says planned a month of marketing in one day, work that previously took most of a week across meetings, spreadsheets, and five tools. That’s a planning-time claim, not a revenue claim, and the distinction matters as the beta meets its first real holiday.

Marklo is also entering a crowded structural moment. TikTok is turning its feed into a full-funnel sales machine and Meta is pointing 200 million small businesses at its Muse system. Each platform optimizes within its own walls. Marklo’s bet is that lean DTC teams don’t need another channel view; they need a layer above the channels deciding what to promote next week. BFCM will tell them whether that layer is real.

Sources