Onton is emerging as one of the most ambitious attempts to rebuild how people shop online, anchored by a new $7.5 million seed round and a bet that AI can collapse months of decision-making into minutes. The company is designing its search and discovery engine to behave less like a traditional product grid and more like an intelligent companion that helps people move confidently from idea to purchase.
Shopping has quietly become one of the hardest problems on the internet. People spend a collective lifetime moving between tabs, filtering through over-SEO’d listings, comparing conflicting reviews, and trying to work out what is real and what is marketing. The average person takes 79 days to make a single purchase decision, and the number is growing. Onton was built to reset this experience by making every decision as informed as asking an expert and as easy as asking a friend.
Onton has now raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Footwork with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, 43 and others, bringing its total funding to approximately $10 million. The company will use the capital to expand its product, scale its team, and grow its global footprint as demand for trustworthy, intelligent search accelerates.
The timing is significant. Traditional e-commerce is struggling under the weight of unstructured data and models that were never designed for the volume or complexity of information the modern web produces. Existing search engines rely on keyword matching, outdated filters, or advertising incentives that often push relevance to the background. Onton combines a new interface with a novel neurosymbolic AI foundation that learns more about the world with every search, dramatically increasing accuracy and enabling people to move from discovery to decision in minutes.
“We are building the future of decision making online,” said Zach Hudson, CEO and Co-Founder of Onton. “People deserve a way to shop that feels intelligent, transparent, and effortless. Onton is designed to remove the friction that slows everyone down and to give users absolute confidence in their choices.”
The platform allows users to search with natural language, images, or both. It aggregates information from across the web into a single product listing so people do not have to bounce between 12 sites to feel confident in their choice. With new creative tools like Imagine and Surfaces, users can dream up the pieces they want and instantly see shoppable versions of those ideas. Onton is already delivering a conversion rate three times higher than the industry benchmark and over 20% of users are weekly active.
“Onton represents a fundamental shift in how people discover and buy products,” said Mike Smith, General Partner at Footwork. “Having seen customer journeys at Walmart.com and Stitch Fix, their search engine, data pipeline, and user traction point to a future where decision making is intelligent, trusted, and far more enjoyable.”
Onton’s users describe the impact directly. One recently explained that Onton helped him find quality products that matched his passions without wasting hours on research. Another said the platform confirmed that the items she was considering were truly unique, giving her the confidence to move forward rather than keep shopping endlessly. Others shared that Onton cut months off their decision-making cycles and helped them restyle or furnish their homes with products they could purchase immediately. Power users are doing over 100 searches per month.
The company’s momentum has been fueled by a clear need and a long list of shared frustrations. Alex, Onton’s co-founder, spent 30 hours looking for a mid-century gray couch with wood trim and realized everyone around him had been through similar pain. Zach had been building Rcmmd and studying trust in online reviews for years. When the two met at a YC Startup School event, they recognized they were approaching the same problem from different angles.
They teamed up, built the earliest versions of the product, won Pioneer, were accepted into the fifth On Deck Fellowship, and began scaling what would become Onton. The team scaled monthly active users to over 1 million with just four employees at the start of 2025 to ten today and expects to add five more soon.
Looking ahead, Onton plans to expand beyond home decor and furniture into new categories like apparel and electronics, guided by the demand it already sees from users. Over time, Onton aims to become a global decision making tool that supports any product, in any category, in any country.
