Channel3, a New York-based startup building what it calls a connected database of every product on the internet, has raised a $6 million seed round to expand its infrastructure for “agentic commerce,” an emerging category of AI-driven shopping experiences where software agents help consumers search, compare, and complete purchases.
The financing was led by Matrix, with participation from Ludlow Ventures and angel investors including Paul Graham, Sri Batchu (former CMO of TheRealReal) and Matteo Franeschetti (founder of EightSleep). Channel3 said the capital will be used to grow its engineering team and to increase investment in computing and AI processing required to interpret product information across the web at scale.
Channel3 is positioning its platform as a neutral, storefront-agnostic product data layer that makes online catalogs easier for AI systems to understand and act on. The company said its API provides access to a real-time product catalog that connects products, variants, images, attributes, and merchant offers across the internet, enabling applications to surface product options and route users directly to merchants for purchase.
The company argues that product data remains a core bottleneck for developers building AI shopping tools, particularly when listings vary by merchant, product attributes are inconsistent, and catalogs change frequently. Channel3 said it uses multimodal AI models to match identical products across retailers, link variants, extract attributes, and interpret product pages so AI agents can retrieve accurate results even when merchants describe items differently.
For merchants, Channel3 said the approach is intended to reduce the lift required to participate in AI-driven discovery channels. By syncing a catalog, merchants can make products discoverable to AI agents without additional technical work, while Channel3 maintains continuously updated product information as standards and schemas evolve. The company also said it provides tracking and affiliate infrastructure to help merchants attribute sales generated through agentic shopping flows.
Channel3 was founded by Alexander Schiff and George Lawrence, who met at Duke University and previously co-founded a startup together. Schiff previously led AI projects at Studio.com after working at Microsoft, and Lawrence is a former Palantir engineer. Channel3 is also a Y Combinator alum, and the company said its catalog currently includes 50 million products and is expanding.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI-driven shopping is only as powerful as the data it can act on. Developers building agentic commerce applications often get stuck on product data because collecting and maintaining it is too difficult and expensive. We handle the infrastructure layer, so developers can focus on building the best user experience.”
Alexander Schiff, Co-Founder and CEO, Channel3
“Product data has always been a problem that no one has fully solved. Now, with multimodal AI models smart enough to understand products and inexpensive enough to operate at scale, Channel3 is making product data reliable, structured and actionable. This enables developers to build AI shopping experiences that are frictionless, intelligent and scalable.”
George Lawrence, Co-Founder and CTO, Channel3
“The team at Channel3 is tackling a generational opportunity that we firmly believe will become the foundational layer for the agentic commerce era. We’re proud to partner with this team as they lead the charge in a massive, emerging market.”
Kojo Osei, Partner, Matrix
