📝 Onton raises $7.5M

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Onton, an AI-powered furniture shopping platform formerly known as Deft, has raised a fresh $7.5 million round led by Footwork, with Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, and 43 participating, bringing its total funding to about $10 million as the startup rides explosive growth from 50,000 to over 2 million monthly active users. The company, founded by Zach Hudson and Alex Gunnarson, is carving out a unique space in AI-driven product discovery by using neuro-symbolic architecture to avoid LLM hallucinations and deliver more logical, real-world-aware recommendations—like understanding that polyester fabric makes a couch more pet-friendly—even as major incumbents like OpenAI, Google, Amazon and rising startups like Perplexity and Daydream race to own AI-assisted shopping. After rebranding to Onton to fix domain and naming confusion, the company has launched features like image uploads, generative “infinite canvas” room planning, and multimodal search that help users describe their ideal spaces even when they don’t know the right words, leading to 3–5x higher conversion rates than traditional e-commerce. With the new funds, Onton plans to expand from furniture into apparel and later consumer electronics, while growing from its current 10-person team to 15 as it builds out its catalog and prepares to face emerging competitors in AI-powered style and shopping.

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