Stay AI is a Shopify-native subscription and retention platform that helps direct-to-consumer brands turn subscriptions into a growth channel rather than a simple billing tool. Founded in 2021 by ecommerce operators Gina Perrelli, Pierson Krass, and Taylor Cawiezell, the platform pairs a no-code, marketer-friendly customer portal with AI-driven churn prediction, smart dunning, cancellation surveys, and A/B testing. More than 500 brands - including OLIPOP, Magic Spoon, Momofuku, Lemme, and ARMRA - use Stay AI to reduce churn, lift recurring revenue, and increase customer lifetime value.
TULU is a proptech company that turns underused lobby and common space in apartment and student-housing buildings into 24/7 on-demand rental hubs. Through IoT-based units and a mobile app, residents can rent or buy brand-name products - from vacuums and e-scooters to VR headsets and household consumables - without owning them. Founded out of MIT's DesignX by Yishai Lehavi and Yael Shemer, the company pairs physical smart units with an AI layer that personalizes inventory per building, and it has served more than 500,000 residents across dozens of cities in North America and Europe.
Firsthand is a New York based AI company building the Brand Agent Platform, a system that lets marketers and publishers deploy their own AI-powered brand representatives to engage consumers in real time across owned sites and paid media. Founded in 2023 by digital advertising veterans behind FreeWheel and AppNexus, Firsthand treats AI as a new communication medium rather than a tool for automating existing marketing. Its Lakebed data and knowledge rights management system lets brands retain ownership and control of their content and data while cooperating with AI. The company raised a $26M Series A in March 2025 led by Radical Ventures.
Prose is a New York-based beauty-tech company that makes custom haircare and skincare to order. An online consultation feeds a proprietary AI engine that blends from a library of natural ingredients into formulas tailored to each customer's hair, scalp, skin, lifestyle, and even local climate. Founded in 2017 by ex-L'Oreal and Phyto executives, Prose is a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a carbon-neutral brand that has produced millions of bespoke products and reached profitability while expanding into skincare and licensing its technology stack, Singular.
Contentful is an API-first, cloud-native content platform - the company that popularized the 'headless CMS.' Founded in Berlin in 2013, it separates content from presentation so teams can store structured content once and deliver it anywhere: websites, mobile apps, kiosks, smart watches, or AI agents. It serves more than 4,800 brands, including roughly 30% of the Fortune 500, and in June 2026 entered an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce to power the content layer behind Agentforce.