Already used by Away, Clare V., Latico Leathers and other fast-growing DTC brands, Forerunner-backed Marklo tells brands running on Shopify exactly what to market next — and builds the cross-channel campaigns for them, ahead of the year's biggest selling season.

Built by DTC operators and engineers from Shopify and Google, Marklo gives lean marketing teams the intelligence and execution firepower of much larger brands.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 14, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- After building Stella & Dot Brands into a social selling company that sold more than $2 billion in products, serial entrepreneur Jessica Herrin is taking on a question that still consumes marketing teams: What should we market next?

Shopify made starting a business easy. Scaling one has only gotten harder. Brands have more channels, more campaigns and the same lean teams. Even with AI, the hardest part hasn't changed: knowing which products to market to which customers, on which channel, when — and having the bandwidth to execute it as coordinated, on-brand campaigns.

Today, Marklo announced $5 million in seed funding led by Forerunner, with participation from Freestyle Capital, and opened its public beta as brands prepare for the holiday selling season. Marklo is an agentic marketing platform for brands running on Shopify that understands what is happening across the business, identifies the next revenue opportunity and proactively builds the work for marketers to review and approve.

Already used by DTC brands including Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner and Latico Leathers, Marklo knows what a brand has sold, what it has marketed, what's in stock and what's coming next — and what's happening outside the brand: what competitors are promoting, what's trending on social and where the category is moving. It reads all of it to determine which campaigns to run next, then builds the work itself: the calendar, the content, the approvals and the team handoffs that used to happen by hand.

"Every tool in a brand's stack is getting AI, but each one only sees its own corner of the business," said Herrin, founder and CEO 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."

Marklo connects the tools brands already use — Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, Google, Slack, Canva, Figma and more — so products, inventory, promotions, campaigns, creative and results all sit in one system. Unlike AI tools built to optimize a single channel, Marklo works across the full stack.

Brands can install Marklo in minutes. Once connected, it reconstructs launches, promotions, email, SMS, paid media, social activity and revenue into a day-by-day, year-over-year marketing calendar, giving teams an immediate view of what drove sales and what was happening around it.

It's not just a record of what happened. It's where the team plans what comes next: a shared workspace with a marketing calendar, campaign canvas, task list and analytics — and Marklo working inside it. Ask it what to do about slow-moving inventory, what actually drove revenue last November, or what to run the week after Black Friday, and it answers from your own data. Ask it for a campaign and it writes the brief, fills it in and builds the work around it — ready to edit, assign and approve.

Every week, Marklo reviews sales, inventory and what's already on the calendar, then delivers proposed campaigns and reports to the team in Slack or email — with the reasoning and the products behind each one. The work shows up already done, and the marketer decides what to edit and ship.

Early customers are already seeing the impact. Latico Leathers used Marklo to plan a full month of marketing in one day, replacing a process that previously took most of a week across meetings, spreadsheets and five different tools.

"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."

"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 funnel."

Marklo is opening its public beta as brands prepare for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the broader holiday selling season. Brands running on Shopify can use Marklo to see what worked last year, identify products and campaigns they may be overlooking and optimize this year’s marketing plan. Early customers have called Marklo a “no-brainer” and “CMO Dream.”

Marklo will use the funding to grow its product and engineering teams, expand its public beta and invest in customer success and community programs.

"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."

About Marklo

Marklo is the agentic marketing platform for modern commerce. Built for brands running on Shopify, Marklo connects a brand's own data — sales, inventory, campaign history and creative — with market signals from competitors and social, and with the marketing tools its team already uses, then determines what to market next and builds the work for marketers to review and approve.

Founded by serial entrepreneur and DTC operator Jessica Herrin, Marklo’s team brings experience from Shopify, Google, Stanford and leading DTC brands. Marklo is backed by Forerunner and Freestyle Capital, as well as angel investors from Shopify and Klaviyo. Customer data remains private and is not used to train AI models. For more information or to join the public beta, visit Marklo.ai. Marklo is available in the Shopify App Store and listed in Klaviyo's integrations directory.

CONTACT: Press Contact:

Juliet Travis

juliet@liftoffcommunications.com