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Finextra
02-07-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Remark raises $16 million for AI-based online shopping assistant
Remark, the company building human-trained AI product experts for commerce, today announced a $16 million Series A funding round. 0 The round was led by Inspired Capital, with participation from Stripe, Neo, Spero Ventures, Shine Capital, and Visible Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to $27 million. Despite trillions spent on e-commerce infrastructure, the single most effective driver of sales — the in-store expert — has never been replicated online. Shoppers crave personalized guidance, and when they receive it, they convert at staggering rates. Merchants that deliver tailored product advice see meaningfully higher conversion rates, larger order values, and reduced return rates. Remark brings this high-converting experience online, turning passive browsing into confident buying through AI personas trained by over 60,000 human product experts and counting. Remark's language models are trained on the knowledge, tone, and preferences of Olympic athletes, stylists, estheticians, new parents, and more. These insights become always-on digital advisors embedded directly in brand storefronts. Unlike generic chatbots or large language models fine-tuned on public data, Remark's personas are trained on the anecdotes and personal knowledge of subject-matter experts. The result is warm, informed guidance that helps customers find the right products and delivers the kind of personalized, high-touch experience shoppers expect in store. 'We believe AI should elevate the human experience, not replace it,' said Theo Satloff, CEO and co-founder of Remark. 'By working with real product experts to train AI personas, we're creating guidance that's trusted, helpful, and deeply personal. Our goal is to make online shopping feel less like a transaction and more like being guided by someone who truly understands what you need.' Since its funding last year, Remark has grown revenue 4x year-over-year, maintained 100% retention across more than 60 brand partners, and achieved nearly 130% net dollar retention. Remark has driven tens of millions in net new revenue for its customers, delivering an average lift of 10%, and has converted 28% of shoppers — far above the industry average of 1%. It has also helped brands save over $3.2 million in customer service costs by reducing support tickets and guiding shoppers to the right fit more efficiently. 'Remark is redefining how brands connect with customers,' said Kamran Ali, Principal at Inspired Capital. 'They've created an entirely new category of AI-native commerce, one that blends real human expertise with scalable technology. Remark is proving that this model not only improves the shopping experience, but also directly drives business results.' As shoppers increasingly expect deeper guidance in categories like health, beauty, apparel, and outdoor gear, Remark gives merchants a competitive edge by combining the revenue driving power of human retail sales associates with the speed and scale of AI. With this new funding, Remark will expand into new verticals, grow its expert network, and deepen its tooling for training, deployment, and analytics. The company is also building new systems to help brands launch AI personas faster, measure performance in real time, and adapt to shifting customer needs.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Remark raises $16M to build out human-powered expert models for e-commerce
Startups working on AI-powered e-commerce tools often rely on external data or user signals to build and improve their models. However, a company called Remark is taking a different approach by letting thousands of human experts chat with users while they are purchasing items, and then using that knowledge to train models. Remark also makes those experts 'available' all the time by having their AI-powered persona answer questions. Remark said that this resulted in a 10% net revenue gain for partners, which was a great sign for investors. The startup on Tuesday announced $16 million in Series A funding led by Inspired Capital with participation from Stripe, Neo, Spero Ventures, Shine Capital, and Visible Ventures. This brings the startup's total funding to date to $27 million. Remark plans to use the funds to grow its team of 25 people and spend on model training. Remark joins a number of startups that are plugging AI into various areas of e-commerce, such as search, try-ons, chatbots, and dynamic page generation that is suited for AI-powered experiences. While these companies operate in different areas, merchants can only spend so much to enhance their online experience. In this market, Remark could have challenges in scaling and competing with other e-commerce startups using AI. While Remark previously depended on a cut of the sale to generate revenue, the company has moved to a SaaS-based (software-as-a-service) model for better cash flow and now takes a fee based on site traffic. The company's CEO, Theo Satloff, said that physical stores tend to see high conversion rates of 30-35% compared to online stores that convert at roughly 1.5%. With Remark, the startup wanted to change that. 'The reason for low conversion rates on e-commerce sites is that people have a lot of questions when they shop. They have to go on Reddit or ask their friends to get advice about the purchase. In a store, a person with product knowledge helps them, so the conversion rate is high,' he explained. 'At Remark, we want to bring that kind of expertise to online shopping for our partners,' Satloff said in a call with TechCrunch. When a user visits a site that uses Remark, the startup's tool generates a set of dynamic questions that can drive the user's purchasing decision. If a user is looking for pots and pans, the site could ask what kind of stovetop they have, or if they use diesel conduction or gas. When the user clicks on one of these questions, a chat interface opens where they're matched with an expert who can offer advice about buying an item. Remark matches an expert with a user based on skill set and locale, it says. If an expert is not available, the user is matched with an AI bot based on those experts who can help them with their shopping. The company is slowly expanding its expert network. Satloff said Remark works with a variety of accreditation agencies to verify the expertise of the people who work with them. (This is akin to Airbnb adding various experience providers for its platform.) Experts are paid for their time on the platform on a per-chat basis. They are also paid when their AI persona converts a sale. While the startup didn't provide an exact figure for the average earnings that an expert receives, it said its top 20% earn $60,000-$70,000 per year by spending more than 15-20 hours a week offering advice. The catch is that the human expert needs to be alert to requests from users. When a user activates a chat, experts get a notification on their phone on Remark's app, and they have five to eight seconds to claim the chat and respond to the buyer. Remark also dynamically rewrites the content on the website based on the user's conversation with the expert and what they might be looking for. The company has been growing quickly. Following its $10 million fundraise in 2023, Remark has seen 4x revenue growth. It also increased its network of experts from 50,000 to 60,000. Kamran Ali, a Principal at Inspired Capital, said that Remark's utilization of human insights was an important factor in the VC firm investing in the startup. 'As AI continues to take over the Internet, we're going to continue to be inundated with just a ton of AI-generated content everywhere we go. The amount of AI-generated content we see today is dramatically more than a year ago, and that's there's no end in sight. So, having human insights and preferences will actually be at a premium, and that's what attracted us to invest in Remark,' he told TechCrunch over a call. Remark is now working on the ability to generate blog posts that recommend products based on expert conversations. Later, it plans to send personalized follow-up emails to users about a conversation they had with an expert. Sign in to access your portfolio
TechCrunch
01-07-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Remark raises $16M to build out human-powered expert models for e-commerce
Startups working on AI-powered e-commerce tools often rely on external data or user signals to build and improve their models. However, a company called Remark is taking a different approach by letting thousands of human experts chat with users while they are purchasing items, and then using that knowledge to train models. Remark also makes those experts 'available' all the time by having their AI-powered persona answer questions. Remark said that this resulted in a 10% net revenue gain for partners, which was a great sign for investors. The startup on Tuesday announced $16 million in Series A funding led by Inspired Capital with participation from Stripe, Neo, Spero Ventures, Shine Capital, and Visible Ventures. This brings the startup's total funding to date to $27 million. Remark plans to use the funds to grow its team of 25 people and spend on model training. Remark joins a number of startups that are plugging AI into various areas of e-commerce, such as search, try-ons, chatbots, and dynamic page generation that is suited for AI-powered experiences. While these companies operate in different areas, merchants can only spend so much to enhance their online experience. In this market, Remark could have challenges in scaling and competing with other e-commerce startups using AI. While Remark previously depended on a cut of the sale to generate revenue, the company has moved to a SaaS-based (software-as-a-service) model for better cash flow and now takes a fee based on site traffic. Image Credits: Remark The company's CEO, Theo Satloff, said that physical stores tend to see high conversion rates of 30-35% compared to online stores that convert at roughly 1.5%. With Remark, the startup wanted to change that. 'The reason for low conversion rates on e-commerce sites is that people have a lot of questions when they shop. They have to go on Reddit or ask their friends to get advice about the purchase. In a store, a person with product knowledge helps them, so the conversion rate is high,' he explained. 'At Remark, we want to bring that kind of expertise to online shopping for our partners,' Satloff said in a call with TechCrunch. When a user visits a site that uses Remark, the startup's tool generates a set of dynamic questions that can drive the user's purchasing decision. If a user is looking for pots and pans, the site could ask what kind of stovetop they have, or if they use diesel conduction or gas. When the user clicks on one of these questions, a chat interface opens where they're matched with an expert who can offer advice about buying an item. Image Credits:Remark Remark matches an expert with a user based on skill set and locale, it says. If an expert is not available, the user is matched with an AI bot based on those experts who can help them with their shopping. The company is slowly expanding its expert network. Satloff said Remark works with a variety of accreditation agencies to verify the expertise of the people who work with them. (This is akin to Airbnb adding various experience providers for its platform.) Experts are paid for their time on the platform on a per-chat basis. They are also paid when their AI persona converts a sale. While the startup didn't provide an exact figure for the average earnings that an expert receives, it said its top 20% earn $60,000-$70,000 per year by spending more than 15-20 hours a week offering advice. The catch is that the human expert needs to be alert to requests from users. When a user activates a chat, experts get a notification on their phone on Remark's app, and they have five to eight seconds to claim the chat and respond to the buyer. Image Credits:Remark Remark also dynamically rewrites the content on the website based on the user's conversation with the expert and what they might be looking for. The company has been growing quickly. Following its $10 million fundraise in 2023, Remark has seen 4x revenue growth. It also increased its network of experts from 50,000 to 60,000. Kamran Ali, a Principal at Inspired Capital, said that Remark's utilization of human insights was an important factor in the VC firm investing in the startup. 'As AI continues to take over the Internet, we're going to continue to be inundated with just a ton of AI-generated content everywhere we go. The amount of AI-generated content we see today is dramatically more than a year ago, and that's there's no end in sight. So, having human insights and preferences will actually be at a premium, and that's what attracted us to invest in Remark,' he told TechCrunch over a call. Remark is now working on the ability to generate blog posts that recommend products based on expert conversations. Later, it plans to send personalized follow-up emails to users about a conversation they had with an expert.
Business Wire
01-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Remark Raises $16M Series A to Humanize AI in Online Shopping
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Remark, the company building human-trained AI product experts for commerce, today announced a $16 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Inspired Capital, with participation from Stripe, Neo, Spero Ventures, Shine Capital, and Visible Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to $27 million. Despite trillions spent on e-commerce infrastructure, the single most effective driver of sales — the in-store expert — has never been replicated online. Shoppers crave personalized guidance, and when they receive it, they convert at staggering rates. Merchants that deliver tailored product advice see meaningfully higher conversion rates, larger order values, and reduced return rates. Remark brings this high-converting experience online, turning passive browsing into confident buying through AI personas trained by over 60,000 human product experts and counting. Remark's language models are trained on the knowledge, tone, and preferences of Olympic athletes, stylists, estheticians, new parents, and more. These insights become always-on digital advisors embedded directly in brand storefronts. Unlike generic chatbots or large language models fine-tuned on public data, Remark's personas are trained on the anecdotes and personal knowledge of subject-matter experts. The result is warm, informed guidance that helps customers find the right products and delivers the kind of personalized, high-touch experience shoppers expect in store. 'We believe AI should elevate the human experience, not replace it,' said Theo Satloff, CEO and co-founder of Remark. 'By working with real product experts to train AI personas, we're creating guidance that's trusted, helpful, and deeply personal. Our goal is to make online shopping feel less like a transaction and more like being guided by someone who truly understands what you need.' Since its funding last year, Remark has grown revenue 4x year-over-year, maintained 100% retention across more than 60 brand partners, and achieved nearly 130% net dollar retention. Remark has driven tens of millions in net new revenue for its customers, delivering an average lift of 10%, and has converted 28% of shoppers — far above the industry average of 1%. It has also helped brands save over $3.2 million in customer service costs by reducing support tickets and guiding shoppers to the right fit more efficiently. 'Remark is redefining how brands connect with customers,' said Kamran Ali, Principal at Inspired Capital. 'They've created an entirely new category of AI-native commerce, one that blends real human expertise with scalable technology. Remark is proving that this model not only improves the shopping experience, but also directly drives business results.' As shoppers increasingly expect deeper guidance in categories like health, beauty, apparel, and outdoor gear, Remark gives merchants a competitive edge by combining the revenue driving power of human retail sales associates with the speed and scale of AI. With this new funding, Remark will expand into new verticals, grow its expert network, and deepen its tooling for training, deployment, and analytics. The company is also building new systems to help brands launch AI personas faster, measure performance in real time, and adapt to shifting customer needs. About Remark Remark is an AI company making online shopping more human. By combining the voices of real product experts with proprietary AI technology, Remark delivers personalized product guidance that helps consumers make confident choices — and helps brands drive measurable results. Founded in 2022, Remark is based in Boston and backed by Inspired Capital, Stripe, Neo, Spero Ventures, Shine Capital, and Visible Ventures. For more information, visit:
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alexa von Tobel has high hopes for ‘fintech 3.0'
It's been 10 years since Alexa von Tobel sold her financial planning startup Learnvest to Northwestern Mutual for $250 million. Since then, von Tobel became Northwestern Mutual's first chief digital officer, then chief innovation officer, before launching an early-stage venture firm of her own, Inspired Capital, with former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. She's also a New York Times bestelling author, and she's about to launch a new interview podcast, 'Inspired with Alexa von Tobel.' In a conversation with TechCrunch, von Tobel recalled the hectic period around the acquisition, which closed literally days before the birth of her first child, and when she knew it was time to start her own firm. Von Tobel explained that she created Inspired to be the investor she'd dreamed of — one with a 'cultish commitment to entrepreneurship' — when she was a founder herself. And while Inspired is a generalist firm, she said she feels both 'urgent and optimistic' about fintech, the sector where she launched her career. (One of her pre-Inspired fintech investments, Chime, just went public.) 'We think of this wave as fintech 3.0,' von Tobel said. 'The next wave of innovation won't come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population.' The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Congratulations on the 10-year anniversary of the acquisition. Looking back, what do you feel proudest of? First, Northwestern Mutual is an incredible company, and our software became an incredibly important part of the customer experience. And I am so proud that so many of the LearnVest team stayed at Northwestern Mutual for so long, and it really was just a merger of actual values. It's just amazing how simple some things are, it comes down to the values of two companies and the missions of two companies. I sold on a Wednesday and went into labor with my first child that weekend. All jokes aside, I always say it took me about a year to mentally just recover from being, like, all systems were go, my brain was being pushed to manage so many things. Literally, I was having my first child. It was like the world threw a bus at me and I caught it. So when you were closing the deal, was there a ticking clock in your mind, that you had to finish everything before this whole other thing happens? Of course. If you think about it, we literally signed on, I think, 11am on March 25 and then we did a press tour with the CEO, and then the next day, we did a stand up with the entire team, and then I went to sleep and literally woke up in labor. Having your first child is priceless. There's nothing in the world that is more valuable to me than having my children, nothing. And so I kept being like, 'We have to get this done, because I'm not leaving the hospital to come back and close a deal. I actually need to focus on this human being that I'm bringing into the world.' I always joke that the lawyers took me very seriously. When people on the outside talk about an acquisition, obviously, the first thing they talk about is usually the financials, and then one of the signs of success is the product. LearnVest as a product doesn't exist anymore, but it sounds like it was less about having LearnVest as a standalone product and more about transforming Northwestern Mutual. It was so much bigger than a product. [Northwestern Mutual's] John Schlifske, he's no longer CEO, but he is one of the people I look up to most in the world, just a formidable human being. And he kept being like, 'We're gonna merge the companies.' And I would laugh — one is a $40-billion-a-year company, and [the other is] little tiny LearnVest. But he really meant it. He was like, 'We're gonna use this as a catalyst.' It was a catalyst for an entire digital transformation. I became the company's first ever chief digital officer, and then chief innovation officer, and it was really about taking everything and merging it into the broader parent company. My CTO of LearnVest became the CTO of the parent company. You stayed for four years? Yeah, [my last day] was basically end of January 2019, and that day we launched Inspired. How did you know it was time to leave, and where did the idea for Inspired come from? I'm always at my best when I'm building something that I wish existed for me. And I've said many times that the idea for Inspired actually happened when I dropped out of business school, and I was a really all-in entrepreneur in every way — I dropped out basically December 18 of 2008, at the bottom of the worst recession in 81 years, not necessarily the the the most inviting time to start a company. And I really was looking for a capital partner that didn't exist. I had this vision of what it should look and feel like, this sort of rigor and camaraderie and in-the-trenches-ness of what an early stage capital partner could be, and I didn't see it in the market. That was New York in 2008, 2009, and I had this long-term plan of one day, I want to come back and build that. Fast forward to 2018, 2019 I'd started really actively dreaming about what that could look like. And one day I was like, it has to happen, it's now. We're now almost seven years in. We're a dedicated early stage venture fund, generalist, headquartered in New York, but investing everywhere. And I feel like I've been here for one minute. It literally is the best job I've ever had. You mentioned having this idea of a capital partner that you wished you'd had. How do you put that into practice? What was I looking for in that capital? What were you looking for, and how did you get everyone at the on-board with that vision? So, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I always say Inspired is different for four key reasons. The first reason is that we are extremely long duration capital. It means when we back a founder, we truly put blinders on for 20 years. When you're building a company, there's choices you have to make as a CEO, which is, 'Do I do the thing for next month so that things look good, or do the harder thing that won't look good next month, maybe it pays off in three years, or not?' And what we always say is, 'Do the harder thing, do the thing that's creating far more long-term value and worry less about synthetic results.' The second thing is, our team's pretty unique in that we've built and scaled more than 10 businesses that have touched hundreds of millions of users around the world. That mentality is so different when you're sitting in the seat working with an entrepreneur, because we haven't necessarily lived every experience, but we've lived a lot, and we appreciate the contours. It's almost like seeing 3D versus 2D. The third thing is that our team operates like one unit. So when we back a company, you actually get the entire team. At many firms, you get one partner, that's the person they know, they know you, and if, God forbid, that partner leaves, it's like you've evaporated your social equity that you built up with that partner. We operate like a swarm, where you get all of us and we actively do weekly stand ups on the entire portfolio, so that everybody's up to speed. And then the final thing, because of [Inspired co-founder Penny Pritzker], she's on the board of Microsoft, was U.S. Secretary of Commerce. So we like to say that, there are many, many, many, many ways that we can help companies get access to things that are really hard to get as just a sole founder in your 20s or 30s, where we can actually be a tremendous business accelerant to our companies in a pretty unique way, with access to tech and government and many other vectors. So in short, that was the firm I wanted. I wanted a deeply cultish commitment to entrepreneurship. We always talk about this Inspired future — one of the things I love so much about entrepreneurship is, no great entrepreneur shows up and is like, 'Let's make the world worse,' right? They show up and they're like, 'Here's a big problem that's facing a billion people. Let's go fix it.' I think some of the biggest founders in the world, their companies poured out of their DNA. I started LearnVest because my father had passed away, and my mom overnight had to manage our finances. And I was like, I never want a family to feel financially destabilized, and I wanted to go build the solution. When we look back at the broader ecosystem over the last 10 years, one of the big transitions is leaving behind that period of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) for VC and startups. Have you seen a change in the venture ecosystem in the last few years, and has that affected the way you approach investing at Inspired? So just a helpful framework — Inspired is a full generalist fund. We will touch everything from deep tech to health tech to consumer, looking for the biggest, most important ideas of the next 15 years. Every day, when I come to work, I literally mentally walk into this office in 2035. And that's how we're thinking about where the world is going and the problems be solved And I think when ZIRP existed, many things that I would say weren't venture bets, would get backed. And I almost think it would be confusing, because you'd be like: What categories are not venture categories? Lots of categories are not venture categories by nature — if you think about power law, everything that we back ideally has a real chance to be worth $10 billion. There's not a lot of those. I built LearnVest at the bottom of the worst recession in 81 years, and actually LearnVest was not an easy business. It was regulated, there were so many other things that were really hard about what we were doing. I really like hard businesses, because they have defensibility. They have reasons to exist. They have less copycats. I think a lot of things got funded over the last period of, like, 2014 to 2021, that should've been getting a different source of capital. How are you feeling about the state of fintech in 2025? Where are there still opportunities for startups? I'm feeling both urgent and optimistic about the state of fintech today. Financial services remain foundational to a functioning society, but they haven't kept pace with the rapid technological, demographic, and social shifts we're experiencing. The growing federal debt, rising income inequality, and increasing poverty — especially among older Americans — underscore the need for more adaptive and inclusive financial tools. Not to mention the rapid job loss due to AI. This moment presents a major opportunity for startups to reimagine financial products from the ground up. We think of this wave as fintech 3.0. The next wave of innovation won't come from superficial tweaks but from fundamental deep product reinvention — tools that meet the needs of a changing economy and a more diverse, digitally native population. We're excited by founders who see this challenge clearly and are building bold solutions to address it. You launched LearnVest on-stage at the TechCrunch 50 conference in 2009. If you were a judge at our Startup Battlefield in 2025, what would you be looking for in the winning team? I would be looking for a founder who, based on who they are and their lived experience, has a powerful, unique insight to a problem that touches hundreds of millions of people, if not more. Two, I would be looking for something that is non-obvious. You know, I think some of the biggest and best ideas are non-consensus, people don't think they're interesting. Third, I would look for an entrepreneur who's living and breathing a decade out. They see this very powerful future. And the final thing I would look for is the founder who has — there's a spikiness, there's a grit and resilience, but also a command, that you can sit with them and you can like it's palpable, that they will figure out a way to succeed. Those are the key ingredients that you look for. 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