Onton co-founders: Zach Hudson (L) and Alex Gunnarson after raising $7.5 million to expand the startup’s AI-powered commerce platform.San Francisco-based Onton, an ambitious AI-powered commerce startup, has secured $7.5 million in a seed funding round led by Footwork, with participation from investors including Liquid 2, Parable Ventures and “43.” The raise brings Onton’s total funding to approximately $10 million as it aims to redefine how consumers discover and buy products online.
Founded in 2022 by Zach Hudson and Alex Gunnarson, Onton, formerly known as Deft, began life as a furniture and home-décor shopping platform. It now plans to expand into apparel and consumer electronics, broadening the scope of its ambition beyond just home goods.
At the heart of Onton’s proposition is what the company calls a “neuro-symbolic” AI architecture. According to co-founder and CEO Zach Hudson, this approach lets the engine aggregate, then reason over—product data across disparate retailers, avoiding the hallucination risks typical of large language models while delivering logically consistent and trustworthy search results. The system can also infer real-world attributes that may not be explicitly listed by retailers – for instance, whether a fabric is “pet-friendly” based on composition, or anticipate how a piece of furniture might fit in a user’s space via image-based inputs.
Users of Onton reportedly grew from just 50,000 monthly active users to more than 2 million today, all with a small founding team that has grown from three full-time employees in 2023 to around 10 currently, with additional hiring underway.
Through tools like “Imagine” and “Surfaces,” customers can upload images or describe what they envision for their space or style, and Onton returns curated, shoppable options that match. According to company estimates, this model yields conversion rates three to five times higher than traditional e-commerce platforms, giving consumers more confidence and reducing decision time dramatically.
Hudson frames Onton’s mission as more than building a better shopping site: “We are building the future of decision-making online.” The goal, he says, is to make every shopping decision feel “as informed as asking an expert and as easy as asking a friend.”
The timing appears opportune. Industry analysts and investors increasingly believe AI-based agentic commerce, where AI assistants help consumers browse, compare, and buy, is the next frontier. Traditional keyword-based search and filter-heavy catalog browsing are giving way to more intuitive, context-aware discovery experiences.
With fresh capital, a growing user base, and a vision that spans multiple retail categories, Onton seems poised to take on legacy e-commerce platforms. If successful, its neuro-symbolic search engine could become a global entry point for online shoppers — reshaping how people discover, compare, and decide what to buy.
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