Onton, a product search and discovery engine, has 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.
According to Onton, 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 Existing search engines rely on keyword matching, outdated filters, or advertising incentives that often push relevance to the background.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 neurosymbolic AI foundation that learns more about the world with every search, targeting 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.”
Onton 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 across twelve sites to feel confident in what they choose. With new creative tools like Imagine and Surfaces, users can dream up the pieces they want and instantly see shopable versions of those ideas. Onton claims a conversion rate three times higher than the industry benchmark, with more than 20% of users being active at least weekly.
Across the industry, the forces shaping shopping are shifting fast. The Internet is filled with unverified, automatically generated content, and the burden is landing on consumers to separate signal from noise. Brands are becoming walled gardens, and long-trusted sources for product recommendations are disappearing. At the same time, people are rapidly adopting AI-first interfaces and expecting search to behave more like an intelligent assistant than a filterable list. These shifts are reshaping expectations for relevance, accuracy, and trust.
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. The company will continue refining its knowledge graph, scaling its data pipeline, and preparing to introduce a customizable search engine that adapts to each individual. Over time, Onton said it aims to become a global decision-making tool that supports any product, in any category, in any country.