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 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.”But that obsession has now attracted a sizeable seed round led by Valley Capital Partners and backed by AI heavyweights like former Google AI chief John Giannandrea.The bet is simple the static rigidity of most digital files has limited their utility, and a better, more intelligent document that actually shares its edit history and ownership with users as intended, is not only possible — it’s a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. The history of digital documentsTo understand why a seed round would balloon to $73 million, you have to understand the scale of the trap businesses are in. There are currently an estimated three trillion PDFs in circulation. “Some people see the PDF more than they see their kids,” Gavish jokes.The history of the digital document …
