Factify raises $73M to give digital documents an AI brain

The digital document, a cornerstone of modern business, has remained stubbornly inert for decades. While AI reshapes everything around it, the foundational files—PDFs,.docx, Google Docs—persist as static, fragmented vessels of information. This is the paradox that Tel Aviv-based startup Factify is betting $73 million to solve, emerging from stealth with a seed round led by Valley Capital Partners and backed by figures like former Google AI chief John Giannandrea.Founder and CEO Matan Gavish, a Stanford PhD and computer science professor, frames the mission not as a mere software upgrade but as an inevitable architectural shift. He argues that the PDF, a format designed in the early 90s for visual fidelity, and its counterparts are fundamentally incompatible with an AI-driven world.When a large language model 'reads' a PDF, it's performing an act of optical character recognition on a digital photograph, not querying structured, verifiable data. Factify's response is to rebuild the document from the ground up, creating a new format where the file itself becomes intelligent infrastructure.A 'Factified' document carries its own identity, a live permission system, and an immutable audit log, transforming it from a liability—a static file to be guarded—into an asset, an API that can answer questions about its own history and validity. Gavish is acutely aware of the graveyard of failed formats that demanded too much behavioral change; thus, Factify's approach hinges on deep backwards compatibility, allowing documents to look and feel familiar while embedding new capabilities.The monumental engineering lift, funded by this sizable seed round, aims to create not another collaboration tool but a new standard for digital truth—an immutable record layer for the age of AI. For the estimated three trillion PDFs in circulation, this represents not just an evolution, but a potential revolution in how we conceive of information itself.

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