The Shopify subscription platform built for retention - turning the second purchase into a growth channel, not just another invoice.
Most subscription software was built to do one thing well: collect a recurring payment. Stay AI was built for the harder problem that starts the moment the charge goes through - keeping the customer around for the next one.
The company sells a Shopify-native platform that lets direct-to-consumer brands launch, run, and optimize subscription programs. On the surface that means a drag-and-drop customer portal, subscriber acquisition tools, and analytics dashboards. Underneath, it means machine learning that predicts who is about to cancel, automated flows that intervene before they do, and A/B testing that treats a subscription program the way a marketer treats a landing page.
It is a deliberate reframe. Stay AI's pitch to merchants is that a subscription is not a billing relationship but a performance channel - something you test, personalize, and grow.
That gap is the origin story. Before Stay, its founders ran an ecommerce agency and watched brands scale subscription programs with tools that couldn't be steered by the people running them. The product they wished existed became the company they built.
Source: Stay AI merchant-reported figures. Individual results vary by brand and category.
Roughly 17% of monthly subscribers cancel right around the time their next payment is due. For a brand that spent real money acquiring them, that is the single most expensive moment in the customer lifecycle - and the one legacy tools quietly ignore.
Stay AI's customers are the DTC and CPG brands living inside that math: beverage, supplement, food, and beauty companies where a subscriber's lifetime value can dwarf their first order. The platform's job is to catch subscribers in the cancellation window and give the brand a reason - and a mechanism - to keep them.
It does that with predictive churn scoring, dynamic cancellation surveys that adapt to why someone is leaving, smart dunning to recover failed payments, and win-back automation for the ones who slip away anyway.
All-in-one Shopify subscription management with a no-code, drag-and-drop customer portal, acquisition tools, and analytics.
Machine-learning churn tool that scores cancellation risk and runs adaptive cancel surveys. Born from the Bellwethr acquisition.
Journey-based promotion builder for personalized subscriber offers, gifts, and upsells - no developer time required.
Automated win-back campaigns that re-engage churned or paused subscribers before the relationship is gone for good.
Predictive churn forecasting, smart dunning, self-optimizing surveys, and automated A/B testing across every touchpoint.
Add-on strategies, cross-sell, and dynamic offers designed to grow average order value inside the subscription itself.
In a crowded field - Recharge, Skio, Awtomic, Loop, Ordergroove, Smartrr - Stay AI's wedge is who it hands the controls to. Legacy platforms often route changes through developers. Stay puts A/B testing, portal design, and offer logic in the hands of the marketing and retention teams who own the numbers.
The second differentiator is the AI layer. Rather than bolting on generic automation, Stay's models were built around the specific question of churn - a focus reinforced when it acquired Bellwethr in 2022 and folded that technology into RetentionEngine.
Stay AI is B2B SaaS. Merchants pay recurring subscription and usage fees to run their own subscription programs on the platform, which is listed in the Shopify App Store and integrates natively with Shopify checkout and data.
It sits in the Shopify subscription-and-retention category, positioned at the retention-obsessed end - courting mid-market and larger DTC brands for whom lifetime value, not just sign-ups, is the metric that matters. Its customer roster of recognizable CPG names is itself the market signal.
More than 500 Shopify brands have migrated to the platform. A sampling of the names:
In a market addicted to acquisition spend, Stay AI raised to double down on the opposite - keeping the customers brands already have.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / Pre-A | $7.5M | 2022 | Watchfire Ventures; Nik Sharma (Sharma Brands); Adam Turner (Postscript) |
| Series A | $8.6M | Jul 2023 | Telescope Partners; Boulder Food Group; Riverpark Ventures; Vanterra Capital |
| Total | $15.1M | — | Disclosed to date |
Before Stay, the founding team built and bootstrapped the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group, scaling it from $0 to $12M in ARR in under four years and helping brands like OLIPOP and Vita Coco grow their subscription programs.
The founders build an award-winning ecommerce agency, scaling subscription programs for brands like OLIPOP and Vita Coco.
Frustrated by the lack of marketer-friendly subscription tools, the team launches a platform, initially named Retextion.
Stay acquires Bellwethr and folds its machine-learning technology into what becomes RetentionEngine.
Retextion becomes Stay AI and announces $15.1M in total funding, including an $8.6M Series A led by Telescope Partners.
Ships WinbackEngine and deepens AI-driven personalization, churn prediction, and automated optimization.
Crosses 500 migrated merchants and reports saving customers over $150M in lost subscription revenue in a year.
Platform walkthroughs, feature demos, and retention playbooks from the Stay AI channel.
Search demos →The CEO on rethinking subscriptions and building loyalty for CPG brands.
Watch interviews →It's a Shopify-native subscription and retention platform that helps DTC brands launch, scale, and optimize subscription programs with no-code tools and AI-driven churn prevention.
Gina Perrelli (CEO), Pierson Krass (President), and Taylor Cawiezell founded it in 2021, after running the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group.
$15.1M in total, including an $8.6M Series A led by Telescope Partners announced in 2023, plus an earlier $7.5M round.
More than 500 Shopify brands, including OLIPOP, Magic Spoon, Momofuku, Lemme, ARMRA, and Vita Coco.
It treats subscriptions as a performance channel, giving marketers no-code A/B testing, personalized offers, and AI-powered churn prediction rather than just recurring billing.