Jessica DiLullo Herrin built and sold two companies before most entrepreneurs close their first funding round. Now she's placing a bet that direct-to-consumer brands are drowning in disconnected marketing data—and willing to pay for a lifeline.
Marklo AI, her San Mateo startup, announced a $5 million seed round in mid-October led by Forerunner Ventures, with checks from Freestyle Capital and former Klaviyo executives now at Shopify. The same day, the company opened its public beta for an AI-powered revenue planner that promises to stitch together Shopify storefronts, email campaigns, and ad spend across Meta, Google, and TikTok into a single planning interface.
The timing isn't accidental. Marklo opened its public beta ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026, when DTC brands face their highest-stakes marketing decisions of the year. The company has no revenue yet but plans to charge a SaaS subscription layered with usage-based fees, according to its announcement.
Herrin's pitch centers on a problem familiar to anyone managing a seven-figure ad budget across fragmented platforms. "Every tool in a brand's stack is getting AI, but each one only sees its own corner of the business," she said. Marklo's software vacuums up historical campaign performance and arranges it in what the company calls a "Hindsight Calendar," mapping which emails, social posts, or paid ads actually moved product. From there, it generates campaign suggestions and creative briefs spanning email, ads, and landing pages.
The platform also connects to Slack, Canva, and Figma for workflow handoffs. Customer data stays private and isn't used to train AI models, the company emphasized in its announcement and privacy documentation.
A Founder Who's Been the Customer
Herrin's resume reads like a blueprint for understanding retail chaos from the inside. She founded Stella & Dot, the social-selling jewelry brand that racked up over $2 billion in sales before she stepped back. Earlier, she co-founded what became WeddingChannel.com, which The Knot scooped up in 2006 for roughly $61.7 million in cash plus equity, according to SEC filings at the time.
"Jessica uniquely has been the customer that she's building for right now at every stage," Kirsten Green, founding partner at Forerunner, told Crunchbase News. That credibility appears to be opening doors with established brands testing the platform.
Marklo's 11-person team includes former engineers from Shopify and Google. Scott Royston, listed on the company's website as founding CTO, is steering the technical build.
Early Adopters Signal Interest
More than 100 brands participated in pilot tests before the public launch, the company said. Named early customers include luggage maker Away, accessories label Clare V., children's clothing company Monica + Andy, jewelry designer Maya Brenner, and leather goods brand Latico Leathers.
Allison Plaisance, senior director of retention marketing at Away, said the platform "gives us the whole commercial picture and an actionable path forward." Latico Leathers reportedly planned an entire month of marketing campaigns in a single day using Marklo's tools.
A handful of reviews on the Shopify App Store, where Marklo has been listed since late 2025, show a perfect rating, though the sample size remains small and the dates on some reviews raise questions about the timeline.
Scaling Into a Crowded Market
Marklo plans to deploy the seed capital toward expanding its product and engineering teams, broadening the public beta, and building out customer success infrastructure. The company is actively recruiting for a CTO, head of customer success, and senior full-stack engineers, according to its careers page.
The broader sales and marketing software category has seen investment activity cool in recent years. Startups in the space have raised billions globally, though deal volume has declined for several consecutive years as investors concentrate bets on fewer companies, according to Crunchbase data.
Marklo positions itself as distinct from attribution-focused analytics tools like Triple Whale and Northbeam, emphasizing planning over post-mortem analysis. Whether that distinction resonates with DTC brands juggling tight budgets and rising customer acquisition costs will likely determine how much runway this $5 million buys.
The company is pushing to build momentum ahead of the next major retail peak, betting that marketing leaders exhausted by platform fragmentation will pay for synthesis. It's a familiar gamble in enterprise software, though one delivered by a founder who's felt the pain firsthand.
