Tel Aviv-based startup Factify emerged from stealth at the moment with a $73 million seed spherical for an formidable, but quixotic mission: to convey digital paperwork past the usual codecs most companies use — .PDF, .docx, collaborative cloud information like Google Docs — and into the intelligence period.
For Matan Gavish, Factify’s Founder and CEO, this isn't only a software program improve—it’s an inevitability he has been obsessive about for years.
"The PDF was developed when I was in elementary school," Gavish informed VentureBeat. "The bedrock of the software ecosystem hasn't really evolved… someone has to redesign the digital document itself."
Gavish, a tenured professor of laptop science and Stanford PhD, admits that his fixation on administrative file codecs is an anomaly for somebody together with his credentials.
"It's a very uncool problem to be obsessed with," he says. "Given the fact that my academic background is AI and machine learning, my mom wanted me to start an AI company because it's cool. I'm not sure why I'm obsessed and then possessed by documents."
However that obsession has now attracted a sizeable seed spherical led by Valley Capital Companions and backed by AI heavyweights like former Google AI chief John Giannandrea.
The guess is easy the static rigidity of most digital information has restricted their utility, and a greater, extra clever doc that really shares its edit historical past and possession with customers as supposed, just isn’t solely doable — it's a multi-billion-dollar alternative.
The historical past of digital paperwork
To grasp why a seed spherical would balloon to $73 million, you need to perceive the dimensions of the lure companies are in. There are presently an estimated three trillion PDFs in circulation. "Some people see the PDF more than they see their kids," Gavish jokes.
The historical past of the digital doc just isn’t a linear development the place one format replaces one other. As an alternative, it’s a story of "speciation," the place completely different codecs advanced to fill distinct ecological niches: creation, distribution, and collaboration.
The period of information: Microsoft Phrase (Nineteen Eighties–Nineties)
Digital paperwork started as remoted artifacts. Within the Nineteen Eighties, the "document" was inextricably linked to the {hardware} that created it. A file created in WordPerfect on a DOS machine was successfully gibberish to a Macintosh consumer.
Microsoft Phrase, which traces its lineage to the pioneering WYSIWYG editors at Xerox PARC, modified this by leveraging the dominance of the Home windows working system. By the Nineties, the binary .doc format turned the default container for editable skilled paperwork. Nonetheless, these information had been structurally advanced "memory dumps" designed for the restricted {hardware} of the time, usually resulting in corruption or privateness leaks the place deleted textual content remained hidden within the file's binary knowledge.
The period of digital 'stone': the PDF (Nineties-2006)
The PDF didn’t originate as a instrument for writing; it was a instrument for viewing. In 1991, Adobe co-founder John Warnock penned the "Camelot Project" white paper, envisioning a "digital envelope" that might look similar on any show or printer.
Not like Phrase information, which had been malleable, PDFs had been designed to be immutable. They used the PostScript imaging mannequin to put characters at exact coordinates, making certain visible constancy. Whereas adoption was initially gradual, Adobe’s 1994 choice to launch the Acrobat Reader without spending a dime established PDF as the worldwide customary for "digital concrete"—the format of finality used for contracts, authorities kinds, and archives.
The collaborative cloud docs period (2006-present)
In 2006, Google disrupted the mannequin once more by shifting the doc from the laborious drive to the browser. Utilizing "Operational Transformation" algorithms, Google Docs allowed a number of customers to edit the identical stream of textual content concurrently.
This shifted the paradigm from "sending a file" to "sharing a link." Whereas Google Workspace now claims over 3 billion customers (principally shoppers and training), it essentially modified how we work—turning paperwork into dwelling, collaborative processes relatively than static artifacts.
The established order: fragmentation
Regardless of these advances, the enterprise world stays fragmented. We draft in Google Docs (the "Digital Stream"), format in Phrase (the "Digital Clay"), and check in PDF (the "Digital Stone").
However this fragmentation has a price. "The problem is not the document. It is everything around it," the corporate notes. "Once a PDF leaves your system, control is gone. Versions drift. Access is unclear. Nothing is visible."
Turning digital paperwork into clever infrastructure
Factify’s wager is that within the age of AI, this fragmentation is now not simply annoying—it’s a vital failure. AI fashions want structured, verifiable knowledge to perform.
When an AI "reads" a PDF, it’s basically guessing, utilizing optical character recognition to scrape textual content from what’s successfully a digital photograph.
"What we're dealing with here is a megalomaniac vision, but it's at the same time probably something that is inevitable," Gavish says.
Factify’s answer is to deal with paperwork not as static information, however as clever infrastructure. Within the "Factified" customary, a doc carries its personal mind. It possesses a novel identification, a dwell permission system, and an immutable audit log that travels with it.
"We wrote a new document format that supplants the PostScript," Gavish explains. "We created a new data layer that supports the document as a first class citizen… and it's always available inside the organization and potentially outside."
This distinction—between a File and an API—is the core of the corporate's pitch"
Files are liabilities: They accumulate, get lost, and can be stolen. "It goes again to a brick standing," Gavish says. "Recordsdata are liabilities, if something, as a result of they only accumulate there, you need to guard them."
APIs are assets: A Factify document is an active object. You can ask it questions: "Who has seen you? When do you expire? Are you essentially the most up-to-date model?"
'People don't change', but formats do
History is littered with formats that tried to replace the PDF (like Microsoft’s XPS). They failed because they demanded too much behavioral change from users. Gavish is keenly aware of this trap.
"Once I discuss to enterprise software program entrepreneurs, I inform them the 2 legal guidelines to learn about beginning an organization in enterprise software program is that individuals don't care, and nobody adjustments," he says.
To skirt this, Factify has built deep backwards compatibility. A Factified document can look exactly like a PDF, complete with page breaks and margins. Users don't need to learn a new interface to get value; they just need to solve a specific pain point—like an executive who wants to ensure an investment memo can’t be forwarded.
"All they’ve to inform their staff is, 'Pricey Chief of Employees, employment agreements and funding memoranda… are going to be Factified. The remainder keep on,'" Gavish says. "They see instant profit… however then they uncover that they've crossed the Rubicon."
What's next for Factify?
The capital from this round will be used to deepen the platform's core engineering—which Gavish describes as a "heavy engineering carry" requiring them to rebuild the document format, data layer, and application layer from scratch. The company is also establishing a major operational hub in Pittsburgh to support its U.S. expansion.
Ultimately, Factify isn't trying to build another collaboration tool like Google Docs. They are trying to build the immutable record of the future—the standard for "fact" in a digital world.
"The PDF… turned a regular that means I can’t file my taxes utilizing another format. That is how victory seems to be like," Gavish says. "We’re making a doc customary that’s not particular for well being care or for insurance coverage, however is simply doc as such."
For the three trillion static information presently sitting in cloud storage, the writing might lastly be on the wall.
