Factify Wants to Give Your Documents a 'Brain' with $73M Seed Round

In a world dominated by static digital files, a new startup is emerging with an ambitious vision to revolutionize how we interact with documents. Factify, a Tel Aviv-based company, has just secured a massive $73 million seed round to move beyond traditional formats like PDFs and Word documents and usher in an era of 'intelligent documents.' Think of it as giving your digital files their own brain.

Matan Gavish, Factify's Founder and CEO, believes the current document ecosystem is fundamentally broken. "The PDF was developed when I was in elementary school," Gavish told VentureBeat. "The bedrock of the software ecosystem hasn't really evolved... someone has to redesign the digital document itself." While his academic background is in AI and machine learning, Gavish's passion lies in solving what he calls the "uncool problem" of document evolution. This obsession, however, has attracted significant attention, including backing from AI heavyweights like former Google AI chief John Giannandrea.

The Evolution of Digital Documents: From Clay to Stone to Streams

To truly appreciate Factify's mission, it's essential to understand the journey of digital documents. It hasn't been a simple upgrade path, but rather a story of 'speciation,' where different formats evolved for specific purposes:

• The Era of Files (1980s-1990s): Early digital documents were often tied to the hardware they were created on. Microsoft Word's .doc format eventually became a dominant force, but these files were complex, prone to corruption, and could even hide deleted data within their binary structure. They were like 'digital clay' – editable but fragile.
• The Era of Digital 'Stone' (1990s-2006): Adobe's PDF emerged not for creation, but for viewing and distribution, aiming for perfect fidelity across all platforms. Designed to be immutable, PDFs became the 'digital concrete' for contracts, forms, and archives – reliable but rigid.
• The Collaborative Cloud Docs Era (2006-Present): Google Docs revolutionized document handling by moving them to the browser and enabling real-time collaboration. This shifted the paradigm from sending files to sharing links, turning documents into dynamic, living processes – a 'digital stream.'

The Problem with Fragmentation

Despite these advancements, the business world remains fragmented. We draft in Google Docs, format in Word, and finalize in PDF. This fragmentation leads to a loss of control. "Once a PDF leaves your system, control is gone. Versions drift. Access is unclear. Nothing is visible," the company states. This is where Factify aims to step in.

Factify: Documents as Intelligent Infrastructure

In the age of AI, this fragmentation is more than just inconvenient; it's a critical failure. AI models thrive on structured, verifiable data. When an AI encounters a PDF, it's essentially guessing, using OCR to extract text from what is essentially a digital image.

Factify's solution is to treat documents not as static files, but as intelligent infrastructure. Their new document format, which they call 'Factified,' imbues documents with a unique identity, a live permission system, and an immutable audit log. Gavish likens the difference to APIs versus files:

• Files are liabilities: They accumulate, get lost, and can be stolen. They require constant guarding.
• APIs are assets: A Factify document is an active object that can be queried. You can ask it questions like "Who has seen you?" or "When do you expire?"

Overcoming User Inertia

History is littered with attempts to replace the PDF that failed because they demanded too much change from users. Gavish is keenly aware of this. "People don't care, and no one changes," he notes about enterprise software. To overcome this, Factify has built deep backward compatibility. A Factified document can look and behave exactly like a PDF, eliminating the need for users to learn a new interface. The key is to solve specific pain points, like ensuring an executive memo cannot be forwarded, and then gradually introduce users to the broader capabilities.

The Future is 'Factified'

The $73 million seed funding will be used to build out Factify's core engineering, including their new document format, data layer, and application layer. They are also establishing a major operational hub in Pittsburgh for U.S. expansion.

Factify's ultimate goal is not just another collaboration tool, but to create the immutable record of the future – the standard for digital truth. As Gavish puts it, "We are creating a document standard that is not specific for health care or for insurance, but is just document as such." For the trillions of static files currently lurking in cloud storage, the future of documents might just be intelligent.