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

Not only are big tech companies using AI to help you create or summarize content, they also want you to use it to shop. OpenAI, Googleand Amazon We have invested heavily in AI assistants that search for new product categories for you and suggest the right ones to purchase.

Start-up companies such as Confusion, Daydreamingand Cherry It has also built a business around AI for product discovery. All of these efforts have led to customers using more AI to shop. Onton (Formerly known as Dift), an AI-powered furniture shopping platform, says it has seen its user base grow from 50,000 monthly active users to more than 2 million monthly active users, serving millions of searches and photo generations.

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, 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 eventually consumer electronics.

The company rebranded from Deft to Onton earlier this year, citing confusion around the original name and the difficulty of securing a premium domain.

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

For its core technology, the company uses what’s called neuro-symbolic engineering. With this approach, the company can eliminate the hallucination problems experienced by LLM holders and deliver better logical search results, Hudson said. He added that the startup model can also learn information from the real world that may not necessarily be included in a product description.

“Let’s say you’re searching for pet-friendly furniture. Our tools know that if the item contains polyester, it will be more resistant to stains and scratches, and therefore will be more pet-friendly. Our tools learn these things with every 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 account while displaying results.

Onton has added different input methods and features to help people with their short- and long-term decisions. Now you can upload a photo or add a prompt to create what you want to achieve with your home or office setup, and Onton can find furniture for you based on that.

Onton also offers an infinite image creation panel, where you can add existing images alongside products you find to ponder. You can also add photos of your room and ask the tool to furnish it.

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

The startup said that using these methods, it has been able to convert customers 3 to 5 times more than traditional e-commerce sites, where they can trust the underlying data.

Hudson noted that because of technological changes and changes in the interface, it will be easier to launch clothing. The company is building its catalog in this category and plans to launch the vertical soon. In this category, you will face competition from companies such as Daydreaming, aesthetic, and Style.ai.

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