An Israeli startup seeking to move the world beyond the PDF has raised an unusually large seed round, signaling strong investor confidence in rethinking how digital documents are created and managed.
Factify said it has secured $73 million in seed funding, placing the round among the largest of its kind globally outside the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence sectors.
The funding began with a $10.3 million pre-seed round completed in 2024 and was topped up in a seed round led by Valley Capital Partners. Participants include senior figures from finance and technology, among them John Giannandrea, formerly a top artificial intelligence executive at Google and Apple, investment banker Ken Moelis, hedge fund executive Peter Brown, private equity veteran Jim Perry, Clutch Capital partner Shai Doron and Shai Wininger, a co-founder of Lemonade and Fiverr.
The company did not disclose its valuation, but industry estimates place it at roughly $300 million or higher based on comparable seed rounds.
Founded by Prof. Matan Gavish of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Factify is building what it describes as a new digital document infrastructure designed for an era in which artificial intelligence plays a central role in business operations.
Unlike traditional PDFs, Factify’s documents are designed to track access, manage versions and control permissions while allowing software agents to extract data and insights. The documents are viewed in a web browser and resemble standard PDFs, allowing organizations to use them without changing how files are stored or shared.
Gavish said the widespread reliance on PDFs has become a growing problem as organizations attempt to automate processes and adopt AI tools. He estimates there are about 3 trillion PDF files in use worldwide, containing contracts, regulatory filings and other essential business records.
“Most documents today are essentially digital paper,” Gavish said. “They don’t know who accessed them, which version is current or which copy is authoritative. That has turned from a nuisance into a real risk.”
Factify is running paid pilot programs with organizations in highly regulated industries, including banking, insurance, legal services, human resources and operations. The company said its technology allows legal and compliance teams to limit access to sensitive information and require approvals directly within the document itself.
The idea for the company grew out of more than a decade of academic work. Gavish began researching the limits of file-based systems during his doctoral studies at Stanford University, where he examined how reliance on static files could hinder future automation.
Factify was founded in late 2023 and initially financed by Gavish. It employs about 40 people, most of them in Israel, with the remainder based in the United States.
The company said the funding will be used to expand its development teams, strengthen its core platform and work more closely with organizations that depend heavily on documents.
Gavish said investors are backing the company’s attempt to create a foundational layer for document automation.
“This is an area that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades,” he said. “The expectation is that we can build infrastructure that allows organizations to operate very differently as technology evolves.”