In one of the biggest seed rounds ever completed, Israeli startup Factify, which has developed a post-PDF document standard, today announced it has raised $73 million to build a new foundation for documents. The round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from senior Silicon Valley tech and business leaders including 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 hedge fund Renaissance.
Factify was founded by Prof. Matan Gavish of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gavish, who spent many years at Stanford University, contacted all the executives he knew from his time at the prestigious university and eventually managed to form a group of private investors, alongside Valley Capital Partners. He persuaded them to support a company that is now taking its first steps and is exploring the realization of Gavish’s decade old dream to replace the old PDF documents produced by Adobe, with a much more sophisticated, more user-friendly digital format, with the capabilities of a website or browser.
The PDF format was invented by computer scientist John Warnock, one of the founders of Adobe, which has become the default for any contract or agreement. In fact, PDF documents, which have been used as a standard for three decades, largely constitute the contractual infrastructure of the modern economy, with three trillion documents.
“Warnock wanted to create a digital document, a kind of copy of paper on a computer screen and he succeeded in doing so and created a global standard. But now it’s time for a new standard,” Gavish tells Globes. “A PDF has no buttons, and no user interface. It’s a file and it doesn’t have changing states. It’s stored in all kinds of repositories and in different types of software, such as software for checking financial transactions or signature software but in the end it’s a closed and inefficient object, and one that’s not suitable for the era of AI automation.
“The entire industry is based on outdated infrastructures”
Gavish adds, “In order to deal with the limitations of existing formats, an entire industry of point solutions has been built around them over the years, including electronic signature systems, version management, storage and text recognition. The entire industry is based on outdated infrastructures, and in effect perpetuates a critical problem: the documents themselves have no structured way of knowing which version is the latest, who accessed them, and which is the authoritative source that can be trusted. What was previously mainly an operational nuisance has become in recent years a significant risk for organizations that aspire to move into the AI era. I believe that in the future, working on documents will be simpler and will allow not only collaboration between humans, but also between computers, and therefore machines will also require access to contractual documents.”
Gavish, a colleague of Prof. Amnon Shashua, decided to take a sabbatical and make his dream come true. He built a team of engineers in late 2023 and presented his investors with a system that he is now starting to market to medium-sized organizations of hundreds or thousands of employees in the US. The system, called Factify, produces a digital document that “lives” on the network, and is designed primarily for AI agents, and carries within it dynamic content, access permissions, and context that can be changed or edited. Unlike a PDF file that moves out of control when it is sent outside the organization, the new document remains managed and controlled wherever it goes, so that access to part or all of it can be approved or blocked even after it is sent.
Thus, legal teams use Factify documents to require the signing of confidentiality agreements before transferring sensitive data, to limit exposure to certain parts of the document, and to determine which version of the document is decisive in the event of a dispute. Operations teams use the platform to manage supplier onboarding and approval processes directly within the document itself, instead of disjointed processes scattered across emails, shared folders, and tools that don’t communicate with each other.
Gavish is aware of the difficulty of replacing the PDF format that has taken root in the financial world for the past 30 years, and does not plan to do it all at once, but rather to offer it for specific uses in medium-sized companies, to examine the needs in various industries such as law, marketing, finance, and real estate. Despite the feeling that there must be many companies that have developed a competing format that includes editing software – in fact, there are almost none. “We are building a new system, a new format, a data layer, and user experience interface applications. In order to build a connected, smart document that can support changes, it is necessary to build a lot of things from scratch. I don’t know anyone else who has thought about and gone big on this.”
What’s stopping Adobe from launching a competing system tomorrow morning?
“I’m not afraid of that. If you look at history, Adobe is a company that hasn’t innovated for many years, and the law of nature is that startups will always move much faster than giant companies. That’s why there are startups in the world, and that’s why Microsoft and Adobe don’t crush every startup that’s born. To compete with us, Adobe would have to rebuild their entire infrastructure, but such a move usually doesn’t happen in large companies because of the innovation dilemma: large software companies don’t get to the point where they can afford to experiment and reduce revenue to lift the bar. A publicly traded company will always listen to existing customers and continue to do what it’s doing.”
Factify employs fewer than 50 people in offices in the Montefiore neighborhood of Tel Aviv and in Pittsburgh. Also joining the funding round were Shai Wininger, co-founder of Lemonade and Fiverr, Jim Perry, founding partner at the Madison Dearborn Fund, and Shay Doron, principal at Clutch Capital.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on January 28, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.
-1024x683.jpg "Judge Who Helped Violent Illegal Alien Evade ICE Faces New Test")
-1024x683.jpg "Montana Puts Democrats in a Bind as Senate Hopes Fade")
