From Stella & Dot to Marklo: Jessica Herrin Raises $5M for AI-Powered Marketing Platform

While pregnant with her first child and employed at Dell, Jessica Herrin began experimenting with jewelry trunk shows during evenings and weekends in Austin. That side project evolved into Stella & Dot, which generated more than $2 billion in sales through a network of independent sellers over two decades.

Now Herrin is tackling a different challenge: the marketing obstacles she faced while building that business. She founded Marklo in 2025 to assist consumer brands in selecting which products to highlight and structuring their promotional efforts. The company has secured $5 million in seed funding, marking its first major capital raise.

Forerunner led the investment round, with participation from Freestyle Capital and several angel investors with backgrounds at Klaviyo and Shopify. The Burlingame, California-based startup is preparing to open its platform to the broader market as the holiday season approaches, with plans to use the capital to expand its engineering team, refine its product and strengthen customer support operations.

Planning campaigns

Marklo aggregates information from Shopify and marketing services including Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta and Google, consolidating past launches, promotions and sales data into a single calendar view. This unified perspective allows teams to identify connections—such as whether a sales spike coincided with paid advertising, a product launch or viral social content—that might remain invisible when reviewing each platform separately, according to Herrin.

The platform then uses this historical data alongside competitor activity and social media trends to recommend which products a brand should promote next, factoring in current inventory levels and timing. Teams can draft campaign plans, create marketing materials and delegate tasks, with suggested campaigns and performance reports accessible through Slack or email.

Herrin highlighted a limitation she encountered with other AI tools: they lack the broader business context needed for practical recommendations. "Hey, no, I can't. It's not Fourth of July. We don't have the inventory anymore," she recalled thinking when a tool suggested repeating a successful Fourth of July promotion.

In another instance, Marklo identified a color trending on social media and matched it to a handbag a retailer had stocked but not recently promoted, then offered to draft a post based on a previously high-performing template. Latico Leathers used the software to plan an entire month of marketing in a single day—a task that previously required most of a week across meetings, spreadsheets and five separate tools.

All of Marklo's recommendations go through human review and approval before execution. The company states it does not use customer data to train its AI models. Currently, brands can install and test the platform at no cost, with Marklo planning to introduce a monthly subscription model supplemented by usage-based fees.

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

A change of direction

Marklo emerged from a fundamental shift in Herrin's thinking about Stella & Dot's trajectory. The original company enabled women to generate income on flexible schedules by hosting trunk shows from their homes, later expanding into apparel and skincare while distributing more than $500 million to its sellers.

"For me, it was never about the jewelry," Herrin reflected.

When COVID-19 halted in-home gatherings, Stella & Dot's revenue plummeted 80% almost instantly. Simultaneously, Herrin recognized that potential sellers now had alternative paths—they could build followings as influencers or launch their own Shopify storefronts. She characterized Stella & Dot as "the COVID victim that had pre-existing conditions."

Rather than attempt to resurrect the original model, Herrin divested the businesses and brands separately, though she later reacquired the Stella & Dot brand to explore a new sales channel and pilot Marklo. As she approached her 50th birthday, she questioned whether she would launch the same venture again.

"As an entrepreneur, you don't just start a business; you start a life," she said.

Herrin remained committed to helping others build businesses, but the specific problem she wanted to address had evolved. While launching an online store had become simpler, the challenge of managing marketing—requiring data collection from multiple systems and coordination of successive campaigns—persisted.

"The mission was the same, but the solution needed to evolve," Herrin said.

A return to venture capital

Marklo represents Herrin's reengagement with venture funding after relying primarily on retained earnings to expand Stella & Dot. She had raised venture capital for her initial venture, which became WeddingChannel.com, but felt the company had secured excessive capital. With Stella & Dot, she adopted a different strategy, building the business with approximately $2 million in funding while prioritizing profitability.

"Here's a new growth strategy," Herrin recalled thinking. "How about profits?"

For Marklo, she determined that raising capital would enable faster hiring of engineers and accelerated software development. The 11-person team includes engineers with previous experience at Shopify and Google. Herrin also prioritized investors with commerce expertise.

"Raising capital isn't just about having money for expenses," Herrin said. "It's about bringing a brain trust together."

Experience as 'the customer she's building for'

Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, identified Herrin's Stella & Dot background as instrumental to backing Marklo.

"Jessica uniquely has been the customer that she's building for right now at every stage, from starting a brand to having a brand at scale," Green said. This firsthand experience gives Herrin insight into where teams squander time, which decisions impact profitability and what brands require before adopting new technology.

While AI broadly facilitates marketing content creation, Green sees greater potential in helping brands determine what to promote and understanding the effect on margins and growth aligned with brand identity. Marklo, she noted, incorporates the judgment necessary to convert business data into actionable recommendations.

This opportunity reflects AI's expanding role in sales and marketing investment. Through mid-September, startups in sales, marketing and customer relationship management raised $7.5 billion across 830 rounds globally, with most investment flowing to AI-related companies. Funding is tracking below 2025's $11.1 billion, while deal volume faces a potential fourth consecutive year of decline—indicating investors are concentrating capital in fewer companies.

"It's one thing to collect the information; it's another thing to understand how to present it and how to recommend an action against it," Green added.

Green also highlighted Marklo's capacity to serve brands at varying stages of maturity, since coordination grows more complex and information sharing more difficult as companies scale. Software capable of expanding alongside its customers represented another compelling factor for investment.

Additionally, Green valued Herrin's approach of developing Marklo alongside brands already testing it, ensuring customer feedback informed the product before its public launch.

"I like the fact that she built this product while it was being used," she said.