Stay Ai, formerly known as Retextion is helping Shopify brands build up their subscription program and reduce the number of cancellations, thus increasing customer lifetime value. Most of the buyers end up abandoning their shopping carts and out of those who sign on to monthly product deliveries subscription, 17 percent cancel before the next payment gets deducted. To address these pain points of brands, Stay Ai, founded by Gina Perrelli, Pierson Krass and Taylor Cawiezell, has been deployed across the Shopify ecosystem.
Perrelli and Krass, who co-founded Lunar Solar Group, an e-commerce agency, along with Cawiezell established the company in 2021. Before Stay Ai, Perrelli and Krass created three commerce enablement tools. While two were venture-backed apps, the other one was a self-funded data platform KnoCommerce, which in 2022 exited to WeCommerce.
With cancellations typically, the highest cancellations happen between order No. 1 and order No. 2. So, how do we get that number down so that you actually become profitable? It can be as easy as telling customers on an upcoming notification that they were going to get a gift, which made them hold out one more order, this is typically where brands become profitable on a subscription purchase. Getting them over that hump is a huge game-changer.
Gina Perrelli, CEO, Stay AI
How Stay AI Works
Stay Ai created memberships and clubs with loyalty tools like SMS chatbot, reward programs and a recurring commerce enablement platform for subscriptions to help Shopify merchants boost the lifetime value of customers. Managed by its ExperienceEngine, which is an AI-powered system that enables merchants to perform different marketing procedures.
Merchants can do A/B testing, and then make use of machine-learning models and predictive analytics to make wise decisions on its deployment. According to Stay Ai, one of its clients, Olipop, successfully increased subscriber revenue by 35% within 90 days of using Stay Ai’s tools.
“With cancellations typically, the highest cancellations happen between order No. 1 and order No. 2. So, how do we get that number down so that you actually become profitable? It can be as easy as telling customers on an upcoming notification that they were going to get a gift, which made them hold out one more order, this is typically where brands become profitable on a subscription purchase. Getting them over that hump is a huge game-changer,” CEO Perrelli told TechCrunch in an interview.
Stay AI’s Series A Funding
Cashing on Shopify’s popularity, several startups such as Triple Whale, Postscript, Replo, Shop Circle, Polar Analytics and Popup managed to attract venture capital interest. Stay Ai is the latest to join the bandwagon. In the Series A funding, the company raised $15.1 million including $8.6 million led by Telescope Partners besides participation from Riverpark Ventures, Boulder Food Group and Vanterra Capital, and an earlier undisclosed $7.5 million led by Watchfire Ventures and a group of individuals, including Postscript founder Adam Turner and Sharma Brands founder Nik Sharma.
Stay Ai intends plans to use the capital for team expansion. At present, it has a team of 50. Stay Ai also aims to accelerate its acquisitions and innovation roadmap and additional acquisitions. “With the acquisition of Bellwethr, we are layering more machine learning into our tools. For some average A/B tests, we get about a 20%, sometimes 30%, churn reduction. When you add an upsell, it starts to add up,” Perrelli said.
Announcing the Series A funding in the memo on its official website, Perrelli wrote: “This fundraiser is a means to serve 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.”
What’s Next?
Perrelli also spoke on the company’s plans for the second half of 2023. “More machine learning and AI to expand personalization across every customer touchpoint and to improve business outcomes with automated optimization,” Perrelli said in four points.
“Enhanced analytics and reporting, with expanded dashboards, additional exporting capabilities and machine learning to help bring you better insights, faster,” she added.
Stay AI also aims to boost customer rewards with functionality for community building and engagement with subscribers. “A fresh take on customer rewards, to continue to give merchants new options to engage with their subscribers, proactively reduce churn, and build community,” she said.
“Acquisition tools, to help brands acquire more high value customers and activate recurring revenue programs in new and unique ways,” the CEO added.
Around 300 Shopify merchants use Stay Ai. Its clients include Vita Coco, Momofuku and Snow among several others. According to Perrelli, from 2022, revenue is pacing 10x. Stay Ai charges a monthly fee of $500 fee from users and takes 1% and 19 cents for all subscription transactions.
