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

Major tech companies aren’t just using AI to help you generate or summarize content — they also want you to use it for shopping. OpenAI, Google, and Amazon have heavily invested in AI assistants that research new product categories for you and suggest the right ones 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 (previously 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, serving 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.

Using this funding, the company wants 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 around the original name and difficulty securing a premium domain.

Zach Hudson, co-founder of Onton, says that while large language models (LLMs) are good at guessing probable intent, they have not solved many problems in e-commerce. He added that the startup has observed that the average time a consumer takes to make a purchase decision has increased.

For its core technology, the company uses what’s called neuro-symbolic architecture. Hudson said that with this approach, the company can eliminate the hallucination problems of LLMs and provide better, logical search results. He added that the startup’s model can also learn information from the real world that might not necessarily be included in a product description.

“Let’s say you are looking for furniture that is pet-friendly. Our tools know that if the item has polyester in it, 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 become smarter at a faster rate,” Hudson said.

He added that often, when you search for a product that might be called different things on different sites, you don’t get great results. The company’s AI model takes those scenarios into consideration while presenting results.

Onton has added different 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 house or office setup, and Onton can find you furniture based on that.

Onton also offers an infinite canvas with 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 furnish it.

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

The startup said that with these approaches, it has been able to convert customers 3-5x more than traditional e-commerce sites, as they can trust the underlying data.

Hudson noted that because of the technological and interface changes it made, it will be easier to launch apparel. The company is building its catalog for the category and plans to launch the vertical 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 10 now, with plans to expand the team to 15 people by hiring engineers and researchers.