The New Era® of Shopping today announced the close of a $1.4 million pre-seed round to help traditional brands become discoverable, trusted, and purchasable inside AI assistants and agent-driven shopping experiences. The investment was co-led by a European VC firm Presto Ventures and an NYC-based AI accelerator Alliance, with participation of a16z Scout Fund, Cory Levy, DVC, hi5 Ventures, Rokubunnoni, and a group of angels.
The Tectonic Shift in How People Shop
Consumer behavior is undergoing its most dramatic transformation since the advent of search engines. As millions of shoppers abandon traditional keyword searches in favor of direct answers from AI assistants, the storefront is moving into the chat window. Today, roughly 5% of consumers ask AI chatbots what to buy instead of browsing online stores. Industry projections suggest that figure will reach 15% by 2027 and could exceed 50% within two years after that.
Why now
Open standards and platform launches (including the Agentic Commerce Protocol and related Instant Checkout flows) are making it possible for agents to transact on behalf of users — and for merchants to participate without rebuilding their commerce stack. At the same time, major players are rapidly enabling tools and protocols for retailers to appear inside AI-driven experiences. That combination makes this the earliest moment for brands to start prioritizing agentic visibility and AI ad strategies.
“In the old era, being on the second page of Google was bad. In the new era, if your product metadata, content, and flows aren’t optimized for AI agents, you don’t exist,” said Oleksii Sidorov, Co-Founder & CEO. “We built Era® so that every brand, not just the ones with large engineering teams, can be present and purchasable wherever consumers are asking to buy. The future of commerce is being written right now, and we are here to make sure our merchants are in it.”
About the product and market
The New Era® of Shopping helps merchants make their catalogues discoverable and shoppable inside AI assistants. Key features of the platform include two-way catalog syncing with PIMs/ERPs, SKU-level intelligence to measure AI visibility and ranking of products inside LLM responses, user prompts analysis for trends and volume insights, and automated content optimization to improve how products rank in conversational answers. The New Era® of Shopping is already integrated with all major eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix, etc, as well as main AI discovery platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. The company is currently running pilots with the first cohort of brands and will use the pre-seed to expand pilots with the Enterprise segment, scale data infrastructure, and integrate new platforms.
Founding story and team fit
The New Era® of Shopping was founded by a team with deep experience at the intersection of AI, eCommerce, and advertising.
A Ukrainian-born, Oleksii Sidorov (CEO), did AI research in University of Oxford and Meta AI Research before he left to found a company on the intersection of AI and eCommerce, Suggestr, which was accepted to Y Combinator’s W22 cohort. Later, he founded two other startups — Slise (Advertising) and Dise (AI CRM), and led them to acquisitions, all while fleeing the war in Ukraine and supporting family back home.
His co-founder and CTO, Sergey Drozdkov, is a serial founder and CTO with more than 12 years of experience in software development and AI. As CTO of Sensorium, he built one of the first AI chatbots two years before ChatGPT release, and later went through Y Combinator’s W23 cohort with one of the first AI sales agents, Intently AI. Together, they represent the exact two disciplines — commerce and AI — that are colliding inside AI answer engines today.
Investors of The New Era® of Shopping
The investment was co-led by a European VC firm Presto Ventures and an NYC-based AI accelerator Alliance, with participation of a16z Scout Fund, a super angel and a founder of ZFellows Cory Levy, AI-focused fund Davidovs VC, Ukrainian VC hi5 Ventures, Japanese Rokubunnoni, early-stage Typhon VC, and a group of angels: Greg Tkachenko (Unreal Labs), Guillaume Roux-Romestaing (Wordware), Kacper Kielak (Magic), Andrei Nenadov, Quinn Campbell, Urvit Goel, Evgeny Yurtaev, Nicole Buss, Matthieu Tissot, and Zituo Chen.
About agentic shopping and AI ads
Agentic shopping describes a new shopping lifecycle in which AI agents — acting on user preferences, history and explicit prompts — discover products, request checkout authorization and complete purchases on behalf of people. The Agentic Commerce Protocol and related platform tooling are lowering the bar for both agents and merchants to transact programmatically, and instant checkout inside assistant experiences is already live in early platforms. Brands that instrument their catalogues, optimize for conversational ranking, and tap into ads designed for agent surfaces will capture the majority of that demand as it scales.
About The New Era® of Shopping
The New Era® of Shopping (era.shopping) is an agentic commerce platform that helps brands make their product catalogs discoverable, trusted, and purchasable inside AI answer engines — including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. By combining catalog sync, AI visibility analytics, competitive intelligence, and prompt-level demand research in one platform, The New Era® of Shopping gives merchants the infrastructure to compete in the next generation of e-commerce. The New Era® of Shopping was launched in 2026 and is backed by leading European and American VCs.
