Big tech companies want AI to be used not only for content generation and summarization, but also for shopping. OpenAI, Google, and Amazon are investing heavily in AI assistants that explore new product categories and suggest the right products to buy.
Startups like Perplexity, Daydream, and Cherry are also building businesses around AI for product discovery. All of these efforts have led customers to increasingly use AI for shopping. Onton (formerly known as Deft), an AI-powered furniture shopping platform, says its user base has grown from 50,000 monthly active users to more than 2 million monthly active users, supporting millions of searches and image generation.
Fueled by this growth, the startup today announced that it has raised $7.5 million in a new funding round led by Footwork with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, 43 and others. This round brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $10 million.
The company aims to use the funding to expand into new categories such as apparel and eventually consumer electronics.
The company rebranded from Deft to Onton earlier this year, citing confusion surrounding the original name and difficulty securing premium domains.
Onton co-founder Zack Hudson says that while large-scale language models (LLMs) are good at inferring possible intent, they don’t solve many problems in e-commerce. He added that the startup has observed an increase in the average time it takes consumers to make a purchase decision.
The company uses so-called neurosymbolic architecture as its core technology. Hudson said this approach allows the company to eliminate the LLM hallucination problem and provide better, more logical search results. He added that the startup’s models can also learn information from the real world that may not necessarily be included in product descriptions.
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“Let’s say you’re looking for pet-friendly furniture. Our tools know that if an item contains polyester, it’s stain and scratch resistant and pet-friendly. Our tools learn these things with each search and get smarter faster,” Hudson said.
He added that searching for products with different names on different sites often doesn’t yield good results. The company’s AI models take these scenarios into account when presenting results.
Onton has added a variety of input methods and features to help people make short- and long-term decisions. You can now upload images and add prompts to generate what you want to accomplish with your home or office setup. Onton searches for furniture based on that.
Onton also offers an infinite canvas with image generation capabilities, allowing you to add existing images along with products you find to get ideas. You can also add an image of your room and ask the tool to place the image for you.
The company believes these features give consumers more options to get to what they need, even if they can’t perfectly describe what they want, rather than sticking to a chat-only approach.
The company says these approaches have helped it achieve three to five times more conversions than traditional e-commerce sites because customers can trust the underlying data.
Hudson said technology and interface changes will make it easier to launch apparel. The company is currently creating a catalog for this category and plans to launch one in the near future. 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, and plans to hire engineers and researchers to expand the team to 15.
