Onton, the AI-powered shopping platform formerly known as Deft, recently secured $7.5 million in a funding round led by Footwork to broaden from furniture into new categories like apparel.

The platform has surged in active users, growing from about 1 million at the start of 2025 to over 2 million monthly visitors, with millions of searches and image generations driving engagement.

Onton’s traction includes rapid user growth and a small team—ten employees—with plans to hire more while expanding beyond home decor into apparel and electronics.

Onton supports multimodal search—natural language, images, or both—and aggregates information from across the web into a single shoppable listing to streamline discovery.

Founder Zach Hudson notes that while large language models guess intent well, e-commerce tasks demand specialized solutions, and the catalog expansion shortens the path to purchase.

Onton uses a neuro-symbolic architecture to reduce AI hallucinations, delivering more logical product results that can learn information not explicitly stated in descriptions.

It infers missing attributes, validates details, and learns product-user relationships with an interpretable neurosymbolic engine to improve recommendations.

The platform aims to cut the typical 79-day online shopping journey for considered purchases to under a day by handling research, comparisons, and confidence-building tasks.

The broader retail context shows traditional e-commerce interfaces have changed little in decades, pushing Onton’s vision of a higher-level decision layer to address fragmented discovery.

As consumers shop visually across platforms, Onton aspires to own the decision interface where intent is expressed through text, images, and mood, blending neurosymbolic reasoning with rich visuals.

Success hinges on effectively combining visual shopping with explainable AI to outpace incumbents and become a global decision-making tool for products in multiple countries.

Beyond chat, Onton offers image uploads, prompts, and an infinite canvas with image generation to help users ideate and visualize furnishings.