Marklo raises $5 million and opens AI marketing beta for Shopify brands

Shopify brands have a new public-beta option for deciding what to promote, not just generating more marketing copy. Marklo opened its beta on October 14, 2026, alongside a $5 million seed round led by Forerunner. The company says its software connects business data and prepares campaigns for marketers to review and approve.

A shared calendar instead of separate channel views

Marklo’s pitch starts with a distinction: knowing how an individual channel performs is not the same as knowing what the business should market next. Founder and CEO Jessica Herrin argues that those decisions require sales, stock levels, past promotions, upcoming products and activity across the wider category.

The company says its platform connects tools including Shopify, Klaviyo, Attentive, Meta, Google, Slack, Canva and Figma. That brings products, inventory, promotions, creative work and campaign results into one system. Marklo also says it draws on competitors’ promotions and social trends when identifying opportunities.

Once connected, the software reconstructs launches, promotions, email, text messages, paid advertising, social activity and revenue into a day-by-day marketing calendar with year-over-year history. The same workspace includes a campaign canvas, task list and analytics. It is designed to serve both as a record of previous activity and a place to plan future work.

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

Jessica Herrin, founder and CEO of Marklo

Prepared work, not automatic approval

Marklo calls the product an agentic marketing platform: software that proposes actions and prepares the work around them. Its stated workflow keeps marketers responsible for editing, assigning and approving campaigns. The company describes two ways to get that work started—asking a question directly or receiving proposals from its recurring reviews.

• On request, Marklo says it can answer questions from a brand’s own data, such as what to do with slow-moving inventory or what drove revenue last November.
• For a requested campaign, it says it writes the brief and builds the surrounding work, ready for the team to edit, assign and approve.
• Each week, it reviews sales, inventory and the existing calendar, then sends proposed campaigns and reports through Slack or email, including its reasoning and the products involved.

The beta is opening ahead of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday selling season. Marklo is positioning the historical view as a way for brands to revisit last year’s results and identify overlooked products or campaigns for this year’s plan.

Early customers and the next spending priorities

The company names Away, Clare V., Monica + Andy, Maya Brenner and Latico Leathers as existing users. Its concrete time-saving example comes from Latico: Marklo says the leather-goods brand planned a month of marketing in one day, replacing a process that had taken most of a week across meetings, spreadsheets and five tools.

That example concerns planning time, rather than a measured sales lift. Away’s senior director of retention marketing, Allison Plaisance, describes a different benefit: connecting campaigns, inventory and sales data that had remained separate despite the brand already using Shopify, Klaviyo and analytics tools.

Freestyle Capital participated in the seed round. Marklo says the funding will support product and engineering hiring, public-beta expansion, and customer success and community programs. Herrin previously built Stella & Dot Brands, which the announcement says sold more than $2 billion in products.

Shopify brands can join the beta through Marklo’s website; the product is also available in the Shopify App Store. Alongside that access, the company makes a data-use commitment: customer data remains private and is not used to train AI models.