Onton raises $7.5M to expand its AI-powered shopping site beyond furniture

Major tech companies aren’t just using AI to help you generate or summarize content — they also want you to use it for shopping. OpenAI, Google, and Amazon have heavily invested in AI assistants that research new product categories for you and suggest the right ones to buy.

Startups like Perplexity, Daydream, and Cherry have also built businesses around AI for product discovery. All these efforts have resulted in customers using more AI for shopping. Onton (previously known as Deft), an AI-powered furniture shopping platform, says it has seen its user base grow from 50,000 monthly active users to over 2 million monthly active users, serving millions of searches and image generations.

Fueled by this growth, the startup announced today that it has raised $7.5 million in a new funding round led by Footwork, with participation from Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, and 43, among others. This round brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $10 million.

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Findigs Launches Policy Optimization Engine to Enable Property Managers to Better Optimize Asset Performance Across Occupancy and Risk

Findigs, the industry’s smartest tenant screening platform, today announced the launch of their Policy Optimization Engine, a powerful new rules engine that gives rental operators the ability to define their entire screening workflow across their portfolio, and see how this screening criteria influences outcomes like occupancy, delinquency, and decision time.

Findigs is the only truly end-to-end tenant screening solution on the market: collecting applications, verifying documents, decisioning applicants, and providing audit trails in one fully automated platform. This comprehensive workflow enables property operators to centralize screening, apply consistent business rules to screening portfolio-wide, and optimize these to improve asset performance and NOI.

“We found that many operators fly somewhat blind when setting their tenant acceptance criteria. For example, we always ask the question, 'how did you decide on the minimum rent-to-income ratio?' and often, it's admittedly an imperfect science,” said Steve Carroll, CEO of Findigs. “So, a lot of focus ends up getting paid to what the right credit score thresholds are, but we set out to give an all-up view of the dozen or so things that impact a leasing decision.”

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Energy regulatory data firm HData is acquiring Insight Engine

For utilities and other energy companies, grappling with complex regulations has always been a hurdle. The data landscape has long been fragmented, requiring teams to devote valuable time and pull together multiple sources of information to monitor regulatory changes — much less understand market trends at scale.

This is the context into which two companies launched their respective regulatory data platforms in the last decade: HData, a platform for compliance and energy regulatory data, and the trade group Advanced Energy United’s Insight Engine project, which incorporates policy insights and summaries into its own database of regulatory documents. 

Today, the two projects are becoming one. HData is acquiring Insight Engine, Latitude Media has learned.

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DailyPay Names Veteran Executive Nelson Chai as CEO

Former Uber CFO to lead DailyPay's next phase of market leadership

NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- DailyPay, the leading worktech platform providing on-demand pay and financial wellness solutions, announced that Nelson Chai has been appointed Chief Executive Officer.

Chai brings more than three decades of leadership experience in top executive posts at some of the world's most recognized financial and technology companies including Uber, where, as CFO, he drove financial transformation and led the company's IPO. He also previously served as CEO of The Warranty Group, President of CIT Group, CFO of Merrill Lynch, and CFO of NYSE, among other executive roles. Chai joined DailyPay earlier this year as Executive Chairman, working closely with the Board and leadership team to refine its growth vision.

"As DailyPay's strategy has advanced to encompass employee financial wellness, Nelson is the right leader for this next stage of growth. His experience at the leading edge of FinTech, and his knowledge of consumer markets, will foster further expansion and enhance our ability to deliver new offerings and even greater value for employers and employees alike," said CeCe Morken, newly elected DailyPay Board Chair.

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Workday and DailyPay Form Strategic Partnership to Bring On-Demand Pay to Millions of Workers

DailyPay Named Workday's Strategic Partner for On-Demand Pay

Strategic Partnership Will Help Companies Recruit, Retain, and Engage Employees By Giving Them Access to Their Money as They Earn it

PLEASANTON, Calif. and NEW YORK, Aug. 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Workday Inc., (NASDAQ: WDAY), the AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, and DailyPay, the leading On-Demand Pay platform, today announced that DailyPay has been selected as Workday's Strategic Partner for On-Demand Pay in the United States and Canada. Through this collaboration, employers can give workers, including frontline and hourly workers, real-time access to their money as they earn it.

DailyPay's solution has been integrated with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workday Payroll since 2023. The companies are now offering a more connected experience for joint customers that empowers employees with access to their earnings on their own schedule, when they need it most.

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