Mate Comes Out of B2B Stealth With 700+ Top Brands and a $15M Run Rate: the AI Growth Teammate for Marketing Teams

GV-backed Checkmate launches mate: AI agents that run growth for Everlane, Billabong and 700+ brands, built profitably with $0 spent on marketing.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, August 18, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Checkmate, the consumer shopping platform backed by GV, DST Global, Blackbird, The Chainsmokers (Mantis) and Paris Hilton, today publicly launched mate (usemate.ai), the AI growth teammate for ecommerce marketing teams. While Checkmate's shopping app was hitting #1 on the App Store, its business side stayed in stealth, quietly signing more than 700 brands, including Everlane, Billabong, Brooklinen, Malbon and JD Sports, to solve their biggest marketing problem: understanding their shoppers, then reaching and converting them. The team did it without a marketing budget, a press release or a new funding round.

Mate is a suite of AI agents that sits on top of a live network of 100 million-plus shoppers and more than 12 billion shopper intent signals. Where marketing software stops at dashboards, mate's agents do the work: they analyse a brand's customers, find high-intent shoppers across Checkmate's ad network, build personalised campaigns, and convert them into orders.

"Brands kept telling us the same thing: they don't need another dashboard, they need another teammate to actually drive revenue," said Harry Dixon, co-founder and CEO. "So we built one. mate does the work a growth team would do, except it has read 12 billion shopper signals and it brings its own ad network. We didn't announce any of this because we didn't need to. The platform sold itself."

The traction, before today's launch:
– 700+ brands on the platform, growing every month, with Quiksilver, Dickies and Eddie Bauer added in recent weeks, and non-ecommerce names arriving too, like travel marketplace RVshare.
– Published customer results including $480K in net-new revenue and 2,450 orders in 30 days for Everlane, and a 40% revenue increase for Kind Patches.
– Profitable, on track to exit the year at a ~$15 million annualised run rate.
– $0 spent on product marketing to date.
– A shopper network reaching 100M+ consumers across app, extension, email, SMS, desktop and publisher partners including NBCUniversal.

The launch arrives as two curves cross. Building an AI marketing agent has never been cheaper. Reaching an actual customer has never been more expensive, or harder to measure. The tracking that made paid social efficient has been dismantled piece by piece: third-party cookies blocked by default in Safari and Firefox, consent-gated in Chrome, and now under an enforcement wave in Europe, where regulators issued close to half a billion euros in cookie-consent fines late last year. At the same time, discovery itself is moving. AI traffic to U.S. retail sites grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, according to Adobe Analytics, meaning a fast-growing share of shopping journeys no longer starts anywhere a brand can bid. Agents are becoming a commodity. Consented first-party data and owned reach are not.

"Foundation models are commoditising. The value is in what you build on top, and what you build it on," said Rory Garton-Smith, co-founder and CTO, previously an iPhone engineering program manager at Apple. "Anyone can generate a campaign with AI now. Almost no one can put it in front of a hundred million real shoppers and get paid only when it converts. Being the data source and the distribution channel at once is the loop you can't vibe-code."

"Every marketing team is being sold an agent right now, and almost none of them come with data or distribution, which is exactly what got scarce," said Frederique Dame, general partner at Google Ventures, who led the company's Series A. "Harry and Rory spent years building the two things you can't buy anymore: consented first-party signal at real scale and a direct line to a hundred million shoppers."

mate launches with six agents covering the marketing stack end to end: customer intelligence, competitive benchmarking, campaign creation and delivery, customer enrichment, AI-search visibility and reporting. Pricing starts from $199/month, with agents available à la carte and growth priced on performance. Checkmate's consumer platform keeps its name and keeps growing, adding cashback, letting shoppers earn by sharing offers, and expanding its publisher partnerships to widen the reach mate delivers against.

About mate: mate is the AI growth teammate for marketing teams, a suite of AI agents on a live shopper network that turns customer intelligence into real campaigns and real revenue. 700+ brands run on mate. Learn more at usemate.ai.

About Checkmate: Checkmate is the consumer shopping platform where 100M+ shoppers get the right offer at the right time across app, email, SMS and desktop. Its app has ranked #1 on the U.S. App Store. Founded in late 2021; $20 million raised from GV, Mantis, Wischoff Ventures and angel investors including Paris Hilton and operators from Pinterest, Rakuten and Amazon. Learn more at usemate.ai.

Rory Garton-Smith
mate
rory@usemate.ai
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