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

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Major tech companies aren’t just using AI to help you curate or summarize content — they also want you to use it to make purchases, too. OpenAI, Google, and Amazon have invested heavily in AI assistants that research new product categories for you and suggest the right categories to buy.

Startups like Perplexity, Daydream, and Cherry have also built businesses around AI for product discovery. All of these efforts are resulting in customers using more AI to make purchases. AI-powered furniture shopping platform Onton (formerly known as Deft) says its user base has grown from 50,000 monthly active users to more than 2 million monthly active users, serving millions of searches and image generations.

Buoyed 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 Liquid2, Parable Ventures, and 43, among others. This round brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $10 million.

Onton co-founders Zach Hudson and Alex GunnarsonImage Credit:onton” loading=”lazy” height=”453″ width=”680″ class=”yf-1gfnohs loader”/>

Using this funding, the company looks to expand into new categories such as apparel and then eventually consumer electronics.

The company rebranded from Deft to Onton earlier this year, citing confusion over the original name and difficulty obtaining premium domains.

Onton co-founder Zach Hudson says that large language models (LLMs) are good at predicting potential intent, but they haven’t solved many problems in e-commerce. He said the startup has noticed that the average time taken by a consumer to make a purchasing decision has increased.

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For its core technology, the company uses neuro-symbolic architecture. Hudson said that with this approach, the company can eliminate the hallucination problems of LLM and provide better, logical search results. He said the startup’s model can also learn information from the real world that isn’t necessarily included in product details.

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

He said that often, when you search for a product that may be called different things on different sites, you don’t get good results. The company’s AI model takes those scenarios into account when presenting results.

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

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Onton also offers an infinite canvas with image creation, where you can combine existing images with the products you find for consideration. You can also add photos of your room and ask the tool to furnish it.

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

The startup said that with these approaches, it has been able to attract 3-5 times more customers than traditional e-commerce sites, because they can rely on the underlying data.

Hudson said that because of the technological and interface changes, it will be easier to launch apparel. The company is building its catalog for this category and plans to launch the vertical soon. In this category it will compete with companies like Daydream, Aesthetic and Style.ai.

The company has grown from three full-time employees now to 10 in 2023, with plans to expand the team to 15 people by hiring engineers and researchers.