Stella & Dot Founder Jessica Herrin Secures Five Million Dollars in Seed Funding for Artificial Intelligence Marketing Startup Marklo

Jessica Herrin, the entrepreneur behind the direct-sales jewelry brand Stella and Dot, has secured five million dollars in seed funding for her latest venture, an artificial intelligence marketing startup named Marklo. The financing round was led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Freestyle Capital and notable angel investors, including former leaders from Klaviyo and current executives at Shopify.

Streamlining Campaign Planning for Consumer Brands

Established in 2025 and headquartered in Burlingame, California, Marklo is designed to help consumer brands navigate the complexities of promotional planning. The software aggregates historical sales figures, inventory records, and past marketing analytics from multiple platforms, including Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, and Google. By centralizing this information into a unified calendar, the platform enables marketing teams to evaluate which past promotions generated actual revenue, determine upcoming product priorities, and draft campaign briefs with automated task assignments.

Before its public rollout ahead of the holiday shopping season, Marklo deployed its software in a pilot program involving more than one hundred brands, such as Away, Clare V., Monica and Andy, Maya Brenner, and Latico Leathers. According to the company, Latico Leathers utilized the tool to compress a week-long planning process involving spreadsheets and multiple applications into a single day of work. The system allows human operators to review and approve all proposed materials while ensuring customer data is not utilized to train artificial intelligence models.

Shifting Focus After Two Decades in Retail

Herrin previously built Stella and Dot into an enterprise that sold over two billion dollars in goods through independent sellers before pandemic disruptions and shifting consumer habits prompted a restructuring. Reflecting on her entrepreneurial journey, Herrin recognized that while launching an online shop has become straightforward, coordinating marketing strategies across fragmented digital tools remains a major hurdle for growing merchants. Marklo intends to address this operational friction by offering a subscription-based model alongside usage fees, making advanced promotional planning accessible to small and medium-sized businesses operating on platforms like Shopify.

• Seed financing round led by Forerunner Ventures alongside Freestyle Capital
• Software integrates data from Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta, and Google
• Pilot program includes participation from over one hundred consumer brands