The New Era of Shopping secures $1.4M in pre-seed funding to help brands optimize for AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini as shopping shifts toward agentic commerce.
As more consumers turn to AI assistants instead of search engines to decide what to buy, a young startup is betting that brands will need new infrastructure to remain visible.
The New Era of Shopping, which operates under the brand Era, announced the close of a $1.4 million pre-seed round to help traditional brands become discoverable and purchasable within AI assistants and agent-driven shopping environments.
The round was co-led by Presto Ventures and Alliance, with participation from a16z Scout Fund, Cory Levy, Davidovs VC, hi5 Ventures, Rokubunnoni and Typhon VC, alongside a group of angel investors.
The Storefront Moves to the Chat Window
Shopping behavior is shifting. Instead of browsing online stores or scrolling through search results, a growing share of consumers now ask AI assistants what to buy.
The company estimates that roughly 5 percent of shoppers already consult AI chatbots directly for purchase decisions. That figure could rise to 15 percent by 2027 and potentially exceed 50 percent in the years that follow, as agentic commerce becomes mainstream.
In this emerging model, AI agents act on a user’s preferences and purchase history, discover products, request checkout authorization and complete transactions — often without the shopper ever visiting a brand’s website.
Era’s platform is designed to ensure that brands are visible and structured correctly within those AI-driven answer engines, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.
“If you’re not optimised for AI, you don’t exist,” said Oleksii Sidorov, co-founder and chief executive.
Infrastructure for Agentic Commerce
Era combines catalog synchronization with PIM and ERP systems, SKU-level visibility analytics, competitive intelligence and prompt-level demand research. The platform analyzes how products rank inside large language model responses and automates content optimization to improve conversational discoverability.
It integrates with major e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and Wix, while also tracking performance across AI discovery channels.
The company is currently running pilot programs with an initial cohort of brands and plans to use the new funding to expand enterprise pilots, scale its data infrastructure and integrate additional platforms.
A Founder Built for the AI Shift
Mr. Sidorov, a Ukrainian-born entrepreneur with a background in AI research at the University of Oxford and Meta AI Research, has previously founded and exited multiple startups. He participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort with Suggestr, an AI-driven e-commerce personalization engine, and later built Slise and Dise, both of which were acquired.
His co-founder and chief technology officer, Sergey Drozdkov, is also a serial entrepreneur with experience building early AI chatbots and sales agents.
Despite the enthusiasm around AI commerce, Mr. Sidorov describes himself as cautious about the hype. While direct purchases through AI assistants are already possible in the United States, he argues that adoption will vary by category. Low-consideration goods may move first, while categories such as supplements or personal care — where comparison and ingredient scrutiny matter — may see more immediate efficiency gains from conversational interfaces.
Also Read: Brands Turn First-Party Data Into Revenue
Reputation Becomes the Ranking Signal
In an AI-driven marketplace, traditional retail advantages — sleek storefronts, visual merchandising, brand storytelling — may carry less weight. Instead, machine-readable signals such as reviews, structured metadata and online references determine whether a product surfaces in an AI-generated answer.
“Six months ago, Reddit heavily influenced LLM outputs,” Mr. Sidorov said. “Now other signals matter more. It shifts constantly.”
For brands, the implication is clear: discoverability is no longer about page rank. It is about being legible to the machines that increasingly decide on behalf of humans.
Era is wagering that as commerce migrates into conversational interfaces, brands will need not just marketing intuition but technical infrastructure to survive.
