Major tech companies are not just using AI to help you generate or summarize content. They also want you to use it for shopping. Companies like 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 are also building businesses around AI for product discovery. These include Perplexity, Daydream, and Cherry. All these efforts have resulted in customers using more AI for shopping. One company, Onton, which is 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. The platform now serves millions of searches and image generations.
Fueled by this growth, the startup announced it has raised seven and a half million dollars in a new funding round. This round was led by Footwork, with participation from Liquid2, Parable Ventures, and 43, among others. This funding brings the startup’s total funding to approximately ten million dollars.
Using this new capital, the company plans to expand into new categories such as apparel and eventually consumer electronics. The company rebranded from its previous name, Deft, to Onton earlier this year. The change was due to confusion around the original name and difficulty securing a premium domain.
Zach Hudson, a co-founder of Onton, says that while large language models are good at guessing probable intent, they have not solved many problems in e-commerce. He added that the startup has observed the average time a consumer takes to make a purchase decision has increased.
For its core technology, the company uses what is called a neuro-symbolic architecture. Hudson said this approach allows the company to eliminate the hallucination problems of large language models and provide better, logical search results. He added that the startup’s model can also learn information from the real world that might not be included in a product description.
Hudson provided an example. If you are looking for pet-friendly furniture, their tools know that an item with polyester would be more stain and scratch-resistant, making it more pet-friendly. The tools learn these things through every single search and become smarter at a faster rate.
He also noted that search results are often poor when you look for a product that goes by different names on different sites. 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 a vision for your house or office setup. Onton can then find you furniture based on that.
Onton also offers an infinite canvas with image generation. 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 believes that these features, rather than a chat-only approach, give consumers more options to find what they want, even if they cannot describe it perfectly. The startup said that with these approaches, it has been able to convert customers three to five times more than traditional e-commerce sites, as users can trust the underlying data.
Hudson noted that the technological and interface changes they made will make it easier to launch an apparel category. The company is building its catalog for this category and plans to launch it soon. In apparel, it will face competition from companies like Daydream, Aesthetic, and Style.ai.
The company has grown from three full-time employees in 2023 to ten now. It plans to expand the team to fifteen people by hiring engineers and researchers.