Needle, an AI-based search and agent development platform, announced it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding in a round led by 468 Capital and Presight Capital. This funding will expand Needle’s engineering team, strengthen its core technology, and accelerate its go-to-market initiatives.
Needle, which has dual headquarters in San Francisco and Berlin, solves a common issue in enterprise environments: accessing valuable information locked away in inaccessible legacy systems, fragmented structures, and siloed storage that traditional AI solutions struggle to process. The lack of accessibility creates inefficiencies and communication bottlenecks and prevents organizations from benefiting from the power of AI.
Needle addresses this challenge by giving organizations instant, seamless, and universal access to data—in documents, notes, and files—through a unified search layer that can scan all internal systems, from Gmail to Confluence and Github.
Users can connect existing tools like Confluence, Slack, Gmail, and Dropbox to Needle’s platform, which then indexes their data, making it instantly searchable and accessible. Through a web interface or API, users can retrieve answers and insights, automate workflows, and build powerful context-aware AI agents, all without deep technical expertise.
The platform’s agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology provides direct and clear answers and users with reliable information to boost productivity. Needle makes implementing RAG technology in an agent framework, which can be a daunting challenge requiring time, expertise, and resources, easy.
The company was founded by Onur Eken (CTO) and Jan Heimes (CEO). Eken has led engineering teams at Everstores and helped scale Delivery Hero and Celonis, while Heimes has worked as a data engineer at Climeworks and Notable Labs (YC 2015).
These founders experienced the inefficiencies of siloed data in their respective industries and now want to democratize AI adoption and transform every organization into an AI-enabled one.
KEY QUOTES:
“Organizations are sitting on goldmines of data current AI systems simply cannot tap into. Our platform provides the foundation for organizations to understand, identify and quickly leverage their existing data assets and build powerful AI applications with just a few clicks.”
– Jan Heimes, CEO and co-founder of Needle
“Businesses and organizations should not have to hire a team of specialists or spend months working to integrate AI. The team at Needle have found a quick and easy solution for businesses of all sizes to unlock the full potential of their data for AI applications.”
– Florian Leibert, General Partner of 468 Capital
