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Marklo has raised USD $5 million and opened its public beta. The round was led by Forerunner.
Marklo sells a marketing platform for Shopify brands. The software analyses sales, inventory, campaign history and external market signals to recommend the next campaign and prepare related work for marketers to approve.
The product is already being used by direct-to-consumer brands including Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner and Latico Leathers. It connects with tools including Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, Google, Slack, Canva and Figma.
Jessica Herrin, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Marklo, started the business after building Stella & Dot Brands. She said marketing teams still face a basic problem despite the wider use of artificial intelligence tools.
"Every tool in a brand's stack is getting AI, but each one only sees its own corner of the business," said Jessica Herrin, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Marklo. "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."
According to Marklo, once connected to existing systems, the platform rebuilds a brand's marketing and revenue activity into a day-by-day, year-over-year calendar. Teams can then use that shared workspace to review past performance, plan campaigns and assign tasks.
It also sends weekly proposed campaigns and reports through Slack or email after reviewing sales, inventory and the existing calendar. Marketers can then edit or approve the work.
Early users
Marklo pointed to early customer results to show how the software is being used inside retail brands with small marketing teams. Latico Leathers used the platform to plan a full month of marketing in one day, replacing a process that had previously taken most of a week.
Away's retention marketing team said the appeal was bringing together information that had previously sat across separate systems.
"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," said Allison Plaisance, Senior Director of Retention Marketing at Away. "Marklo gives us the whole commercial picture and an actionable path forward."
The financing also included participation from Freestyle Capital. Marklo plans to use the new capital to expand its product and engineering teams, widen access to the beta, and invest in customer support and community programmes.
For investors, the company sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence software and consumer commerce, where brands are under pressure to operate with fewer staff while managing more channels.
"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," said Kirsten Green, Founding Partner at Forerunner. "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 funnell."
Commerce focus
Marklo is focused on merchants using Shopify, a large part of the direct-to-consumer retail market. The company argues that many of these brands still manage cross-channel marketing through a mix of spreadsheets, presentations and separate software logins, making it harder to align inventory, promotions, creative work and reporting.
Its system is designed to pull those workflows into one place and recommend what a team should market next based on its own data and activity in the wider category. That pitch may resonate as brands review performance around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the wider holiday sales period, when marketing timing and stock decisions can have an outsized effect on revenue.
Herrin said the challenge is not only deciding what to promote, but also getting teams aligned around the same operating picture.
"Most brands are running cross-channel marketing out of a patchwork of spreadsheets, decks and ten different logins," said Herrin. "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."