The New Era of Shopping secures $1.4M pre-seed for AI-native commerce
Budapest- and San Francisco-based startup The New Era of Shopping has raised a $1.4 million pre-seed round to build an infrastructure layer that makes brands easily discoverable and directly shoppable inside leading AI agents such as ChatGPT and Gemini. The funding positions the company at the forefront of what many investors see as the next major wave in e-commerce: conversational, agent-driven shopping.
Building a commerce layer for AI agents
The New Era of Shopping is developing tools that allow brands and retailers to plug their product catalogs, pricing, and availability into AI assistants and agentic commerce platforms. Instead of sending users to traditional web stores or search results, these agents would be able to surface relevant products, compare options, and facilitate purchases directly within the chat experience.
The startup’s technology focuses on structured product data, real-time inventory integration, and compliant payment flows so that brands can safely transact where consumer attention is shifting: inside AI chat interfaces. By acting as a connective tissue between merchants and AI ecosystems, the company aims to reduce friction for shoppers while opening a new performance channel for marketers.
Competing to define agentic commerce
With this pre-seed capital, The New Era of Shopping plans to expand its engineering team between Budapest and San Francisco and deepen partnerships with major AI platforms. The startup is racing to establish itself as a neutral infrastructure provider in a space where large tech companies and emerging agentic commerce players are vying to control how users discover and buy products through AI.
For brands, the pitch is clear: as consumers increasingly ask AI agents what to buy, being natively present and shoppable inside those conversations could become as critical as search and social channels were in previous digital eras. For investors, the $1.4 million round is a bet that the next generation of online retail will be orchestrated not by websites, but by intelligent agents acting on behalf of users.