Leading tech companies are using AI for more than just content creation and summarization; they’re also aiming to enhance your shopping experience. OpenAI, Google, and Amazon have made significant investments in AI assistants designed to explore product categories and recommend suitable purchases.
Startups like Perplexity, Daydream, and Cherry have also centered their business models around AI-driven product discovery. These combined efforts have led to increased AI usage in shopping among consumers. Onton (formerly Deft), an AI-driven platform for furniture shopping, reports a surge in its user base from 50,000 to over 2 million monthly active users, managing millions of searches and image creations.
Riding this wave of growth, the startup revealed today that it has secured $7.5 million in a fresh funding round spearheaded by Footwork, with contributions from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, and 43, among others. This latest round elevates the startup’s total funding to approximately $10 million.
The company intends to utilize the newly acquired funds to broaden its reach into additional categories like apparel and, eventually, consumer electronics.
Earlier in the year, the company rebranded from Deft to Onton, explaining that the original name caused confusion and made it challenging to secure a premium domain.
Zach Hudson, co-founder of Onton, points out that while large language models (LLMs) excel at predicting likely intent, they haven’t resolved many of the challenges in e-commerce. He also mentioned that the startup has noticed an increase in the average time consumers spend making purchasing decisions.
The company leverages a neuro-symbolic architecture for its core technology. Hudson explained that this method allows them to overcome the hallucination issues seen in LLMs and deliver superior, more logical search results. He added that the startup’s model can also extract information from the real world that may not be explicitly stated in a product description.
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“Suppose you’re in the market for pet-friendly furniture. Our tools recognize that items containing polyester are more resistant to stains and scratches, making them more suitable for pets. Our tools continuously learn from each search, enhancing their intelligence at an accelerated pace,” Hudson explained.
He further mentioned that search results often fall short when seeking a product with varied names across different platforms. The company’s AI model considers these variations when presenting results.
Onton has incorporated diverse input methods and features to assist users in both short-term and long-term decision-making. Users can now upload an image or input a prompt describing their desired home or office setup, and Onton will identify suitable furniture accordingly.
Onton also provides a limitless canvas with image generation capabilities, allowing users to integrate existing images alongside discovered products for brainstorming. Furthermore, users can upload images of their rooms and request the tool to furnish them.
The company believes that these features, as opposed to a purely chat-based interface, will offer consumers a broader spectrum of options to attain their desired outcomes, even without the ability to articulate them perfectly.
The startup reports that these strategies have enabled them to achieve customer conversion rates 3-5 times higher than those of conventional e-commerce platforms, attributed to the reliability of the underlying data.
Hudson stated that upcoming technological and interface modifications will facilitate a smoother launch into apparel. The company is actively curating its catalog for this category and anticipates launching the vertical soon. In this market, it will contend with rivals such as Daydream, Aesthetic, and Style.ai.
The company has expanded from three full-time employees in 2023 to the current count of 10, with intentions to further grow the team to 15 by recruiting engineers and researchers.
