Bellwethr acquired by ecommerce payments platform; merger to boost Shopify brands

A Kansas City startup’s machine learning tech is expected to bring its new owner’s vision to reality: driving new revenue for Shopify brands plagued by churn among subscribers.

Bellwethr announced the acquisition Thursday, detailing the company’s merger with Park City, Utah-based Retextion. As part of the undisclosed deal, Retextion will integrate Bellwethr’s popular churn reduction app RetentionEngine into its platform.

Retextion is a leading solution for recurring payments on Shopify with $6 million in funding and 40-plus full-time team members. Founded in fall 2021, Retextion already powers nearly 100 brands’ subscription programs and processes hundreds of thousands of transactions each week.

Click here to explore Retextion.

Bellwethr comes to the table with sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence used for ecommerce enablement. The startup was originally founded to address churn issues for enterprise customers in banking and telecommunications.

Darcy Howe, KCRise Fund, Victor Gutwein, M25, and Mat Moody, Bellwethr; 2019 Pure Pitch Rally

Mat Moody, Bellwethr, on stage at the Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2019 celebration

A veteran of Techstars Kansas City, Bellwethr raised $3.62 million in its run since 2017 — including backing from local investors like Royal Street Ventures, KCRise Fund, and the Fenaroli Minerva Fund, as well angels in the Wichita-based Accelerate Venture Partners.

“At RetentionEngine we’ve always been limited by the data we could pull out of Recharge and other partners’ APIs,” said Mat Moody, founder and CEO of Bellwethr. “Merging with Retextion and building together will allow us to deploy the full firepower of the AI we’ve been developing for our enterprise clients the last six years.”

RetentionEngine’s entire feature set is now integrated into Retextion for free for all Retextion merchants. Over the next 30 days, the company plans to roll out additional feature sets powered by RetentionEngine’s sophisticated machine learning algorithms that will continue to revolutionize subscription management.

“First up will be a refreshed set of dashboards that is focused on predictive analytics,” Retextion detailed in a press release. “The ability to quickly identify groups of high churn risk customers and use machine learning to find improvements will propel Retextion based subscription programs to the next level.”

Company leaders are buoyed by the coming impact of the merger, said Gina Perelli, co-founder and CEO of Retextion.

“RetentionEngine is hands down the best churn reduction tool on the market,” Perelli said. “We’re thrilled to have the talent and resources to layer powerful machine learning into every aspect of subscriber acquisition, retention, and winback.”