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Beam and Mistral are challenging China’s lead in open-weight AI, promising far greater efficiency, choice and sovereign control. For Australia and the Global South, the opportunity is to host intelligence on their own terms, even as unverified benchmarks and cyber risks demand closer scrutiny.
Israeli startup Factify has raised $73 million in a seed round to build a new document standard for the AI era, aiming to replace the static PDF with intelligent, governable records. The funding was led by Valley Capital Partners and backed by prominent figures in technology and finance.
Factify, a Tel Aviv-based startup, has secured $73 million in a seed funding round to create a new document standard for the age of artificial intelligence.
Factify is developing a post-PDF document standard that embeds intelligence, governance, and security directly into the document itself. The company aims to replace the static, disconnected nature of PDFs with a dynamic, machine-readable format built for automated, AI-driven workflows.
The Portable Document Format or PDF was introduced by Adobe Systems in 1993 and was released as an open standard in 2008. It has evolved over time, adapting to the internet and, later, to mobile phones. Will it survive the rise of AI, where data drives everything, including data and information locked in a PDF?
Adobe is responding with the Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, which allows users to ask questions, summarise, and format documents directly within Acrobat. New competitors are using AI to seize on the opportunity to update how we work with documents.
The Update: Factify has emerged from stealth with a combined $73 million seed round, including a recent $63 million financing led by Valley Capital Partners.
"What drew us to Factify is that this is not a feature or a productivity layer. It is a fundamental rethinking of what a document is at a time when AI is starting to act on business information. The team is building a new default for trust, governance, and automation, and that kind of foundation only comes along once every few decades." - Steve O'Hara, Founder and Managing Partner at Valley Capital Partners
The funding includes participation from notable figures such as John Giannandrea, former Head of AI at Google and SVP of AI at Apple, Ken Moelis, founder of investment bank Moelis & Co., and Peter Brown, CEO of Renaissance Technologies.
The Israeli company, founded in late 2023 by Hebrew University computer science professor Matan Gavish, intends to replace the three-decade-old PDF format with a new standard where documents function as intelligent, governable assets.
Factify is already running paid pilots in regulated sectors like banking, insurance, and legal services, with a US operational hub established in Pittsburgh to support its expansion.
"Replacing the PDF is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We don't just want to solve the inadequacies of the PDF - we want to do it in a way that creates a bedrock for post-AI businesses." - Matan Gavish, Founder and CEO of Factify"
The company plans to use the capital to deepen its core engineering and build out its platform, which treats documents as infrastructure rather than static files.
Why it Matters: Factify's approach addresses a fundamental bottleneck in enterprise automation. As businesses increasingly deploy AI, the inability of these systems to reliably interact with an estimated three trillion existing PDFs creates significant risk and inefficiency.
By creating a document standard that is natively machine-readable and carries its own audit trail and access controls, Factify is building a foundational layer for trusted AI-driven business processes. This could unlock new levels of automation in regulated industries where document integrity is paramount.
The significant backing from leaders in both technology and finance signals strong confidence in the scale of the opportunity to create a new, more intelligent standard for the documents that underpin the global economy.
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