Onton raises $7.5M to expand its AI-powered shopping site beyond furniture

Big tech companies aren’t just using AI to help you generate or summarize content, they also want you to use it to shop. OpenAIGoogle and Amazon have invested heavily in AI assistants that research new product categories for you and suggest the right products to buy.

Startups like Perplexity, Daydream, and Cherry have also built businesses around AI for product discovery. All these efforts have resulted in customers using more AI for shopping. Onton (formerly known as Deft), an AI-powered furniture shopping platform, says it has seen its user base grow from 50,000 monthly active users to over 2 million monthly active users, powering millions of searches and image generations.

Fueled by this growth, the startup announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in a new funding round led by Footwork, with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures and 43, among others. This round brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $10 million.

With this financing, the company plans to expand into new categories, such as apparel and ultimately consumer electronics.

The company changed from Deft to Onton earlier this year, due to confusion surrounding the original name and difficulties in securing a premium domain.

Zach Hudson, co-founder of Onton, says that while large language models (LLMs) are good at guessing likely intentions, they haven’t solved many problems in e-commerce. He added that the startup has noticed that the average time it takes a consumer to make a purchasing decision has increased.

The company uses so-called neuro-symbolic architecture for its core technology. Hudson said this approach allows the company to eliminate LLMs’ hallucination problems and provide better, logical search results. He added that the startup model can also learn real-world information that isn’t necessarily included in a product description.

“Let’s say you’re looking for furniture that is pet-friendly. Our tools know that if the item contained polyester, it would be more stain and scratch resistant, so it would be more pet-friendly. Our tools learn these things through every single search and get smarter faster,” said Hudson.

He added that you often won’t get great results if you search for a product that has different names on different sites. The company’s AI model takes these scenarios into account when presenting the results.

Onton has added several input methods and features to help people with their short- and long-term decisions. You can now upload an image or add a prompt to generate what you want to achieve with your home or office decor, and Onton can find your furniture based on that.

Onton also offers an infinite canvas for image generation, where you can add existing images along with the products you find for ideation. You can also add images of your room and ask the tool to decorate it.

The company believes that rather than sticking to chat-only, these features will give consumers more options to get what they want, even if they don’t know how to describe it perfectly.

The startup said it has helped customers convert three to five times more with this approach than traditional e-commerce sites because they can trust the underlying data.

Hudson noted that because of the technological and interface changes it has made, it will be easier to launch apparel. The company is working on a catalog for this category and plans to launch the vertical variant soon. In this category, it will face competition from companies like Daydream, Aesthetic and Style.ai.

The company has grown from three full-time employees in 2023 to ten today, and there are plans to expand the team to fifteen people by hiring engineers and researchers.