**Berlin**: Information discovery startup Needle has raised $2.2 million in seed funding to improve AI accessibility through its innovative platform. Led by 468 Capital and Presight Capital, the funding will help expand its technology and user base while addressing challenges of siloed data in organisations.
Information discovery and workflow automation startup Needle has recently secured $2.2 million in Seed funding, aimed at assisting organisations in harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) with its innovative data search and agent development platform. This funding round was led by 468 Capital and Presight Capital.
Based in Berlin and San Francisco, Needle addresses the prevalent issue of valuable information being trapped within inaccessible legacy systems, fragmented structures, and siloed storage. Traditional AI solutions often struggle to process data from these fragmented sources, leading to inefficiencies and communication bottlenecks that inhibit organisations from fully capitalising on the advantages offered by AI.
Needle’s platform provides what it describes as “instant, seamless and universal access” to data, which can be found in various documents, notes, and files through a unified search layer. This technology allows users to scan all internal systems efficiently. The company was co-founded by Onur Eken and Jan Heimes. Eken, serving as CTO, has previously led engineering teams at Everstores and contributed to scaling companies like Delivery Hero and Celonis. Heimes, the CEO, also brings a wealth of experience from his time as a data engineer at Climeworks and Notable Labs (YC 2015). Both founders recognised the pervasive issues that arise from siloed data in their respective industries and are now focused on democratizing AI adoption to transform organisations into AI-enabled entities.
With Needle, users can connect existing tools such as Confluence, Slack, Gmail, GitHub, and Dropbox to its platform. The application then indexes data from these sources, making it immediately searchable and accessible. This functionality is enhanced through a web interface or API, where users can extract answers and insights, automate workflows, and develop context-aware AI agents without requiring deep technical expertise.
The company’s agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology is designed to provide users with direct and clear answers, thus facilitating reliable information retrieval to boost productivity. Jan Heimes, speaking to Tech.eu, stated: “Organisations are sitting on goldmines of data current AI systems simply cannot tap into. Our platform provides the foundation for organisations to understand, identify and quickly leverage their existing data assets and build powerful AI applications with just a few clicks.”
Florian Leibert, General Partner at 468 Capital, highlighted the user-friendly aspect of Needle’s offering, saying: “Businesses and organisations 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.”
Although Needle is only a few months old, it has already attracted a significant user base and is nurturing a growing developer community revolving around agent frameworks such as Anthropic’s Claude MCP, Langchain, Langflow, and Haystack. The newly acquired funding will facilitate the expansion of Needle’s engineering team, enhance its core technology, and accelerate the company’s go-to-market strategies.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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