In 2022, Theo Satloff stood at the threshold of a familiar e-commerce dilemma: trillions spent to bring shopping online, yet shoppers still clicked away without buying.
“The reason for low conversion rates on e-commerce sites is that people have a lot of questions when they shop,” Satloff said. “In a store, a person with product knowledge helps them, so the conversion rate is high.” With Remark, the company he co-founded, Satloff set out to replicate that trusted, high-converting in-store experience with a new layer of human-trained artificial intelligence.
Today, Boston-based Remark claims it is delivering on that promise. The company just raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Inspired Capital with participation from Stripe, Neo, Spero Ventures, Shine Capital, and Visible Ventures. That brings its total funding to $27 million. Its pitch: AI personas trained on the knowledge, tone, and preferences of more than 60,000 human subject-matter experts, ranging from Olympic athletes and stylists to estheticians and new parents.
A Human-AI Conversion Engine
Physical stores convert roughly 30% of customers; online stores hover near 1.5%. That gap, the company argues, is largely due to the absence of informed, timely guidance. Remark attempts to fill that void with its expert-trained AI, offering e-commerce brands an always-on advisor embedded into their storefronts. When a shopper lands on a product page, Remark serves up context-aware questions to guide discovery: what kind of stovetop are you using? Gas or induction? Clicking into that question opens a chat interface, where the user may be connected with a live expert or, more often, their AI-trained counterpart.
These AI personas are modeled on the language and personal experience of the human experts who train them. The result, according to the company, is a conversational layer that feels warmer and more nuanced than rule-based bots or language models fine-tuned on general product data. For the human experts, who include stylists, gear testers, and skincare professionals, there is financial upside: they’re paid per interaction and receive a cut when their AI-trained persona drives a sale.
Moving Beyond Traditional AI Tools
Remark’s model diverges from personalization tools that rely heavily on past transactions or clickstream data. Instead, the company is betting on a collaborative future of AI where human insight and lived experience serve as the foundation. “We believe AI should elevate the human experience, not replace it,” said Satloff in a press release announcing the latest funding. “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.”
The business model has evolved alongside the technology. Originally reliant on taking a cut of each sale, Remark now operates under a SaaS model, charging based on site traffic. That shift improves predictability for both the company and its brand partners.
With the Series A funding, Remark plans to invest further in tooling for real-time performance measurement, faster onboarding, and expansion into verticals like health, wellness, and baby products: categories where shoppers have questions and high consideration before purchasing.
Strategic Moat in a Crowded Market
E-commerce AI is a crowded field. From fashion-focused search tools to generative try-ons, a growing list of startups is vying for merchants’ attention and budgets. What differentiates Remark, at least in the eyes of its investors, is the proprietary nature of its expert network and the data it generates. “As AI continues to take over the internet, human insights and preferences will be at a premium,” said Kamran Ali, principal at Inspired Capital. “Remark has created an entirely new category of AI-native commerce, one that blends real human expertise with scalable technology.”
The company’s long-term ambition is to build what Satloff calls “persona-based model building” infrastructure. That includes dynamically rewriting product pages, generating blog posts from expert conversations, and sending personalized follow-up emails to shoppers. In effect, Remark wants to become a layer of humanized intelligence that merchants can plug into every part of the buying journey.
