OneText raises $4.5M from Y Combinator, Khosla to reinvent shopping by text

The experience of general online checkout is swollen in friction. And when more companies are creating a solution around the online checkout, very few people are reciting it from scratch. One such company is Ontext, which is called a “text-to-to-network” that allows buyers to complete the purchase through text message.

The company, founded by former PayPal employees, has closed a 4 million seeds supported by Khosla Ventures, Kotu, City Ventures, Wi -Combinators, good friends (Funds made by the founder of Wubi Parker, Alberds, and Harry), Mat Bellamir, Music’s Frontman, Matt Bellumi.

The co-founder and CEO Jonathan Foodem came up with this idea while working on the checkout squad in PayPal. There, he could see that there are many upstarts with Slick UX with the same market barrier: to refuse the flow of money to the merchants.

Foodem said, “This is a strong pitch,” many merchants do not even have the freedom to choose their checkout supplier; It is often decided by their e-commerce platform.

Using the SMS, no merchant is required to replace the existing checkout on their website. Large platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp also have ecommerce features, Foodem believes that brands still need direct, their own relationship with their customers.

OneText himself has seen themselves as competitors of SMS marketing companies that are known for mass, personal messages and spammy links.

Instead, it uses a combination of AI-driven bilateral conversations and co-ordinary people in the loop to improve conversion by 20-30%. Features such as cart recovery, post-crores upsel and buyer-specific recommendations contribute meaningfully to that performance.

Underneath the hood, Wantext runs its own wallet that integrates to complete the transaction with the existing processor of a brand. Wantext securely vaults the information to pay a customer after their first purchase. Then, they can re -order with a single answer.

This “card-on-file” setup is that Wantext believes that the hotel is the same as charging the item in a room while having a hotel makes its text like trade similar.

To do this, ontext food is used to “compliant” automation which is used. If a brand wants to charge a customer to re -order, Wantext sends a text that will pay within 24 hours if the customer is not canceled. Opt out of it by default.

Over time, it is planned to expand the network so that buyers can use their vault profiles across multiple brands, including pre-filled checkout data and smart recommendations.

In that sense, the company is creating something bigger: a cross-brand, SMS-Native Payment network.

Foodem said, “10x is better to make a customer-face wallet better.” “But we can create a consumer text platform from a business that brings the experience ‘it in your house’ brings the experience, just now it is your phone number that way we’ll make the network”

OneText was passed through the Wi -Combinator in 2023 and quietly created its platform after the Demo Day. Today, the platform has a medium-sized e-commerce brand, consumers are doing $ 10m $ 100m as annual revenue, foodmakes say, although it supports small startups and large enterprises.

“We have been scaling for 3x years and are earning a few million years,” said Foodem, who launched the CTO Daniel Brain.