Announcing Stay Ai’s Series A Fundraise

I am so thrilled that we can officially share that Stay has raised a Series A, bringing our total funding to $15.1m. You can read the official announcement on Techcrunch here. 

Stay Ai was built to solve the limitations in legacy subscription tools, which I was all too familiar with through my previous work building retention programs for 100+ brands as Managing Director of the retention division at Lunar Solar Group.

In just over a year and a half we’ve already delivered: 

• Built-in marketing tools to incorporate offers into upcoming order notifications and the customer portal 
• Testing and analytics capabilities, so brands can see what really moves the needle
• Proprietary machine learning models that deliver more personalized experiences and help automatically improve outcomes

We’re making a huge impact for brands leveraging our tools to drive transformational growth, and we’re just getting started. 

“With the changing macro-environment, it’s been clear to us that brands have to turn their focus to attract and retain loyal customers. Stay Ai puts brands and their consumers first, and we’re confident it will become a leading subscription and loyalty solution for consumer brands.” – Amit Parekh, Principal at Telescope Partners

With $9M in fresh funding, we’ll double down on completely new-to-market features to help brands better reward and retain both subscribers and one-off purchasers.

What Does This Mean for Our Customers?

This fundraise is a means to serving our customers with the most advanced retention features for Shopify, faster. Priorities include expanding our product-centric 50+ person team to drive forward an industry-leading innovation roadmap.

In addition to continued iterative improvements to current features, here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming in the second half of 2023:

1. More machine learning and AI to expand personalization across every customer touchpoint and to improve business outcomes with automated optimization.

2 Enhanced analytics and reporting, with expanded dashboards, additional exporting capabilities and machine learning to help bring you better insights, faster.

3. A fresh take on customer rewards, to continue to give merchants new options to engage with their subscribers, proactively reduce churn, and build community.

4. Acquisition tools, to help brands acquire more high value customers and activate recurring revenue programs in new and unique ways. 

The Power of AI to Turn Your Subscription Program into a Performance Channel

RetentionEngine’s AI models have been refined and perfected over the last three years, giving us the most advanced solution available on the market today.

Our analytics and AI/ML technologies are designed to seamlessly replace the time-consuming processes too many brands are still slogging through, like downloading data, creating pivot tables, and manually identifying the most successful actions.

It’s Time to Treat Your Retention Program Like a Performance Channel

You work hard and spend big to get new customers. With Stay Ai, you can amp up your efforts to keep them. Join hundreds of brands like Olipop, Obvi, Magic Spoon, and more that use Stay to manage millions of subscribers. 

A new name, and three new AI powered feature sets cement Stay Ai as the most comprehensive and powerful subscription tool for ecommerce.

We’re ushering in the next generation of subscription enablement.

When we started building Retextion in the fall of 2021 we had no idea how ambitious our vision would ultimately become. Back then, our core feature was a set of subscriber retention tools delivered via SMS, hence “Retextion” was born.

“Stay” represents where we’re headed in the future as we ultimately plan to go beyond subscription enablement and offer a full array of retention and loyalty tools. While “AI” might seem like a buzzy addition… Our focus in 2023 is applying machine learning across our entire product suite to improve subscriber personalization and loyalty. 

In September 2022, we were excited to announce our acquisition of Bellwethr and their RetentionEngine product, which utilizes machine learning to reduce churn. That was just the beginning.

We’re thrilled to announce three new feature sets that leverage a variety of machine-learning models and years of data to deliver exceptional customer experiences and business-transforming results.

1 | Leverage Ai For 1:1 Personalized Subscriber Loyalty

Increase customer lifetime value.

The ExperienceEngine™ was our first major feature set in early 2022, which makes it possible to map out promotions and offers across an entire cohort of subscribers (ex: upsell on order one, GWP on order two, etc.). 

“While deploying cohort based loyalty strategies was a great start, we wanted to revolutionize subscriber retention. We’ve leveraged 4 years of data to create a system that does just that.” – Jordan Roth, Data Scientist 

AI personalization allows brands to only leverage a gift with purchase when a customer is predicted to churn and focus on upsells for those that aren’t. While this next chapter is exciting, we look forward to ultimately automating subscriber loyalty for a completely personalized customer lifecycle.

2 | Using Predictive Analytics to Forecast Churn Risk

Reduce churn.

In Stay Ai dashboards you can leverage predictive models for churn risk forecasting. Assess churn risk by day, lifetime, or order number to identify high risk cohorts. Use the data to zero-in on problem areas in your business so you can take action. 

If you’re seeing high risk cohorts step in and run a/b tests via the ExperienceEngine to figure out the best way to preemptively reduce churn.

3 | AI Powered Product Recommendations and Portal Personalization

Increase AOV.

We’ve already seen Stay’s customer portal having a substantial impact on subscriber AOV via our smart carousel and banner ads. Taking things a step further, we’re thrilled to announce the addition of AI-powered upsells and cross-sells. 

Brands utilizing Stay will be able to leverage personalized product recommendations across the customer portal, with additional portal personalization points coming this spring.