Marqo is an AI-native search and product discovery platform built for ecommerce, founded in 2022 by CEO Tom Hamer and Chief Scientist Jesse Clark. Hamer previously worked as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, while Clark was lead scientist at Amazon Robotics AI and principal scientist at Stitch Fix, giving the team deep experience in large-scale retrieval and recommendation systems.
The platform unifies the full vector search stack — embedding generation, storage, and retrieval — behind a single API, supporting text, image, and multimodal queries. Marqo's models are trained on click-stream, purchase, and event data, enabling personalised, high-converting results rather than generic semantic similarity. Out-of-the-box integrations with major commerce platforms let merchandising teams roll out semantic search, image search, recommendations, and conversational product discovery without standing up a separate ML infrastructure.
In 2024 Marqo closed a US$12.5 million Series A (approximately A$19.4 million) led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Blackbird Ventures and January Capital participating. The company reported nearly 200x growth in monthly recurring revenue over the preceding year and more than doubled its headcount to over 25 staff. Marqo relocated its headquarters from Melbourne to San Francisco while keeping offices in Melbourne and London.
Marqo competes with Algolia, Coveo, and Bloomreach on the ecommerce side, and with open-source vector databases like Weaviate, Qdrant, and Pinecone on the infrastructure side. Its differentiation lies in domain-tuned ecommerce models and a vertically integrated stack that abstracts away vector database operations.