Onton, a fast-growing AI-powered shopping platform for D2C brands, has gained significant traction raising $7.5 million in a pre-series A funding round led by Footwork. The company, originally named Deft, changed its name earlier this year. This adjustment was needed to eliminate any confusion about its former name and assist in the acquisition of a highly coveted domain name. This new funding round saw participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures and 43. Consequently, Onton’s total funding has now ballooned to nearly $10 million.
Co-founded by Zach Hudson and Alex Gunnarson, Onton has witnessed meteoric growth over the past year since Onton’s conception. The platform has grown its MAU user base from 50,000 users to nearly 2 million users. It’s a core service, with millions of search and image generation queries performed every day, which gives users new and surprising ways to immediately begin interacting with the platform.
Users have the option of simply uploading images or typing prompts and instantly creating their own perfect home or office environments. This feature allows Onton to recommend furniture based on images or descriptions that users provide. As Hudson explained, the platform’s contentious approach is what makes their platform stand out in addressing and widely curtailing the large language models (LLMs) common hallucination complications.
“Let’s say you are looking for furniture that is pet-friendly. Our tools know that if the item has polyester in it, it would be more stain and scratch-resistant, so it would be more pet-friendly. Our tools learn these things through every single search and become smarter at a faster rate,” – Zach Hudson.
This simple but powerful learning capability makes Dero’s user experience more personalized, more valuable, and directly relevant to each user’s unique needs. Onton’s algorithms get smarter with every interaction, creating a resource that’s more than a shopping tool—a deeply personal design assistant.
The latest funding will allow Onton to diversify its offerings and expand into new categories such as apparel and consumer electronics. The founders are primarily focused on using their artificial intelligence patented technology to revolutionize retail shopping in all industries.
Along with expanding its product lines, Onton is in the midst of growing its team. It aims to expand its staff to 15 employees by bringing on more engineers and researchers. This forward-thinking action will help strengthen Onton’s technological capabilities and improve the services they can provide to their clients.
Today, Onton is still expanding but changing quickly. It’s still committed to delivering an easy shopping experience fueled by AI. Toontown has recently received funding and adopted a unique approach. Now, it’s about to change the way consumers shop for furniture and beyond!