Factify wants to move past PDFs and .docx by giving digital documents their own brain

Tel Aviv-based startup Factify emerged from stealth today with a $73 million seed round for an ambitious, yet quixotic mission: to bring digital documents beyond the standard formats most businesses use — .PDF, .docx, collaborative cloud files like Google Docs — and into the intelligence era.

For Matan Gavish, Factify’s Founder and CEO, this isn't just a software upgrade—it is an inevitability he has been obsessed with for years.

"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."

Gavish, a tenured professor of computer science and Stanford PhD, admits that his fixation on administrative file formats is an anomaly for someone 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 ...