Stay Ai Raises $15.1M to Develop the Next Generation Subscription & Loyalty Platform for Shopify Brands

Pierson Krass & Gina Perrelli, Stay Ai
Pierson Krass (Co-Founder & President), & Gina Perrelli (Co-Founder & CEO), Stay Ai

NEW YORK, August 1, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Stay Ai, the customer loyalty operating system for Shopify brands, announced that it has raised a $15.1m Series A, the company's first funding announcement since launching in October 2021. This funding consists of an $8.6m investment led by Telescope Partners, with participation from Boulder Food Group, Riverpark Ventures, and Vanterra Capital. Previous investments total $7.5m led by Watchfire Ventures, alongside industry leaders such as Nik Sharma (Sharma Brands) and Adam Turner (Postscript). 

This funding will build on Stay Ai's rapid first-year growth, which concluded with 300+ merchants like Vita Coco and Momofuku choosing the platform over legacy solutions, as well as the acquisition of RetentionEngine™, a pioneer in applying machine learning to ecommerce. Priorities include expanding Stay Ai's product-centric 50+ team, driving an industry-leading innovation roadmap, and supporting acquisition strategy.

Stay Ai is founded and led by serial ecommerce entrepreneurs Gina Perrelli (CEO) and Pierson Krass (President), who co-founded Lunar Solar Group in 2018, an award-winning ecommerce agency bootstrapped from $0 to $12m in ARR in under four years.

Stay Ai's platform revolutionizes legacy subscription tools in the Shopify ecosystem. With Stay Ai's marquee ExperienceEngine™, brands can apply performance marketing tactics to their subscription programs to manage and personalize customer lifecycles in cutting-edge ways. These unique features have enabled brands like Olipop to drive a 35% lift in subscriber revenue within 90 days of moving to Stay.

"After building subscription and retention programs for 100+ brands, it felt crazy to me that we A/B test every other channel like email or SMS, but with loyal subscribers, we just set it and forget it," said Gina Perrelli.

"Ecommerce brands urgently need dependable, higher margin revenue, and subscription programs were ripe for innovation," said Pierson Krass. "The first half of 2023 was all about integrating proprietary machine learning models into our platform, both for more personalized experiences and to automatically improve outcomes. Next, we're focusing on a variety of never-before-seen tools to help brands better reward and retain customers."

"Stay Ai puts brands and their consumers first and we're confident it will become a leading subscription and loyalty solution," said Amit Parekh, Principal, Telescope Partners.

----

About Stay Ai

Stay Ai (previously dba Retextion) is a subscription enablement and loyalty platform for Shopify brands looking to improve their bottom line. Stay Ai combines a recurring commerce enablement platform for subscriptions, clubs, and memberships with additional loyalty tool sets to help brands increase customer lifetime value. Various features and customer touchpoints are managed via the ExperienceEngine™, an AI-powered system that enables merchants to rapidly deploy A/B tests across their marketing mix and leverage predictive analytics and machine learning models to optimize business outcomes.