Onton Raises $7.5 Million to Revolutionize Shopping with AI

Onton, an AI-powered shopping startup, announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in new seed funding — a fresh boost in its mission to collapse the typical 79-day decision journey into under one day. This brings Onton’s total funding to approximately $10 million, solidifying its bid to transform the way people discover, vet, and purchase products online.

Onton’s platform now supports more than two million users each month, helping them “cut through complexity, find products they trust, and make confident decisions instantly.” With its neurosymbolic AI-driven search and inspiration engine, Onton aims to make shopping feel as informed as consulting an expert — and as easy as asking a friend.

A Growing Problem: Shopping Has Never Been Harder

Online shopping is supposed to be easy. But in reality, many consumers spend days if not weeks flipping between tabs, reading conflicting reviews, and wondering what’s genuinely good versus what’s just marketing hype. That dynamic has only gotten worse as product catalogs balloon, reviews become inconsistent or manipulated, and sites prioritise SEO or ad dollars over user experience.

According to the company, the average consumer now takes about 79 days to finalize a purchase decision — and that number keeps rising. Onton was built in response to that problem. The founding team believes that the friction of modern shopping — complexity, confusion, wasted time — can be eliminated with smart technology.

What Onton Does Differently

At the heart of Onton is a novel neurosymbolic AI architecture — a next-generation engine that combines symbolic reasoning with neural models to deliver search and discovery results that feel smarter, more accurate, and more intuitive. Onton doesn’t rely on simple keyword matching or outdated filters. Instead, it learns from each search, refines its internal understanding of product data and descriptions, and surfaces results that reflect what human shoppers truly care about: relevance, transparency, and trust.

Users interact with Onton in familiar ways: they can search via natural language, by uploading images, or by combining both. Onton pulls in data from across the web to aggregate product listings into unified, comprehensive entries — meaning users no longer have to bounce between a dozen sites to piece together reviews, specs, photos, and price comparisons.

With creative tools like “Imagine” and “Surfaces,” Onton even lets users sketch or visualise the product they have in mind, then instantly see real, buyable options that match that vision. According to Onton, this approach has produced a conversion rate three times higher than standard e-commerce benchmarks, and over 20% of its user base engages on a weekly basis.

Why This Matters — Not Just for Onton, but for the Future of E-Commerce

The significance of Onton’s funding round extends well beyond one startup. The digital commerce economy is grappling with a wave of structural challenges: unstructured data, exploding product catalogs, inconsistent reviews, and user fatigue. Many conventional search engines and e-commerce tools were never built to handle the scale, complexity, and nuance of today’s online shopping environment.

Onton’s approach — blending intelligent AI, unified data aggregation, and intuitive interfaces — could mark a new chapter in how we shop online. Rather than chasing down scattered reviews, toggling filters, or comparing across dozens of sites, Onton promises a streamlined, human-centred shopping experience. That may reshape consumer expectations: no longer content with basic filters and keyword search, people may start expecting e-commerce to behave like a helpful assistant.

If Onton succeeds in expanding beyond home decor and furniture into sectors like apparel and electronics, it could set a new standard for how every category of product is discovered and purchased. For merchants and retailers, it could mean reaching more customers who are ready to buy — and for shoppers, it means spending far less time second-guessing and more time confidently purchasing.