Shopping is moving away from keyword searches toward AI agents that find, recommend, and buy products through chat. Since 5% of shoppers already use AI chatbots, and that number could reach 15% by 2027, traditional brands may become invisible without catalogues and metadata optimised for these agents.
The New Era of Shopping solves this by helping merchants become discoverable and shoppable in AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. It does this through two-way catalogue syncing, detailed SKU visibility analytics, and automated content updates.
The Budapest and San Francisco-based startup recently raised $1.4 million in a pre-seed round. The funding was co-led by Presto Ventures and Alliance, with support from a16z Scout Fund, Cory Levy, DVC, hi5 Ventures, Rokubunnoni, and other notable angel investors.
The new funds will help expand enterprise pilot programs, grow data infrastructure, and add more platform integrations.
Connecting commerce and AI so every brand can win in the age of agent-driven shopping
Founded by Oleksii Sidorov (CEO) and Sergey Drozdkov (CTO), Era aims to equip merchants for a future where AI manages discovery to purchase.
Sidorov shares with TFN, “The emotional driver was watching mediocrity get funded at scale and feeling left out. I saw million-dollar rounds raised on vibe-coded demos, buzzwords, and a tweet and thought, well, that I can do. In reality, we saw gaping holes in AI tooling and application layers for consumer brands. E-commerce is undergoing its most dramatic platform shift since the advent of search engines and desperately needs control handles, which we happen to have.”
Era® plugs into PIMs, ERPs, and eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, syncing catalogues in real time. It tracks how brands rank inside LLMs, analyses user prompts for trends, and auto-optimises content to boost visibility.
Key features include end-to-end agent readiness, real-time SKU intelligence, and broad AI integrations (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity), currently live with pilot brands.
“When it comes to what matters to clients, we’re the only solution that offers analysis of the merchant and SKU-level performance in the shopping carousel, while competitors only show the brand mentions in the text and are not designed for Agentic Commerce. Our tech advantage comes from a proprietary prompt-analysis engine that we’ve developed over 6 months to be able process and generate insights from the millions of textual user prompts in real time,” elaborates Sidorov.
Unlike general eCommerce tools, Era® focuses on “agentic commerce” protocols that support automated transactions. Competitors like Perplexity Commerce (search-to-buy), Shopify Magic (AI content), and Nosto (personalisation) don’t offer full agent analytics.
What about diversity?
On diversity, Sidorov adds, “It may seem like we only hire gay men, but in fact, they are straight. But in all seriousness, we hire talent wherever we can sense it — regardless of the background, gender, country, or age.”
So, what’s next?
Era® plans to expand pilots to enterprise brands, improve data infrastructure for better AI visibility, and add new agent platform integrations.
In the long run, they aim to lead AI advertising strategies, support more large language models, and capture the expected shift where over half of shopping is agent-driven, making agentic commerce the norm for all merchants.
