Onton Raises $7.5 Million to Power AI eCommerce Searches

eCommerce-focused artificial intelligence (AI) search startup Onton has raised $7.5 million in new funding.

The new financing, announced Wednesday (Nov. 26), will be used to expand the company’s product, team and footprint amid what Onton said is growing demand for AI search.

“Shopping has quietly become one of the hardest problems on the internet,” the company said in a news release.

“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 said it works to “reset this experience” by making every decision as informed as speaking with an expert and as simple as consulting with a friend.

Existing search engines, the release added, depend on keyword matching, “outdated filters,” or advertising incentives that deprioritize relevance. Onton said it melds a new interface with a novel neurosymbolic AI foundation that learns more about the world with each search, increasing accuracy and letting people move from discovery to decision in minutes.

“We are building the future of decision making online,” said Zach Hudson, Onton’s co-founder and CEO. “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’s funding comes ahead of a holiday shopping season in which AI is expected to play a large role. As PYMNTS wrote this week, Bank of America Securities forecasts that ChatGPT will handle roughly 20 billion shopping-related messages this year, highlighting how deeply AI is embedded in eCommerce.

“Last year’s holiday season saw global retail sales surge to $1.2 trillion, including $282 billion in the United States, as AI chatbot and agent engagement jumped 42%,” that report said. “But the same systems fueling that growth are melding discovery and checkout into a single step, widening exposure to fraud, chargebacks and questions of consumer trust. Those pressures will shape this holiday season.”

With OpenAI’s Instant Checkout now live, conversational platforms are turning into marketplaces. The shift is reducing the distance between finding a product and buying it.

“AI agents are fast becoming the new gatekeepers of commerce, shrinking discovery from thousands of listings to a handful of curated options and collapsing checkout into a single click,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

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