With $16M, Remark Is Building AI That Sells Like a Store Associate

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.