Needle secures $2.2m to speed up AI search and agent development

Needle, an AI-powered search and agent development platform, has raised $2.2 million seed funding in a round led by468 Capital and Presight Capital . The funding will expand Needle’s engineering team, strengthen its core technology and accelerate its go-to-market initiatives.

Needle, dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Berlin, solves a common issue in today’s enterprise environment: 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, communication bottlenecks and prevents organizations from benefiting from the power of AI.

Needle addresses the challenge by giving organizations instant, seamless and universal access to the data - in documents, notes, files - through a unified search layer which can scan all internal systems, from Gmail to Confluence and Github.

Users connect existing tools such as 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 gives direct, clear answers and provides 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.

It 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).

The founders experienced the inefficiencies of siloed data in their respective industries and now want to democratize AI adoption and transform every organization to AI-enabled one.

Jan Heimes, CEO and co-founder of Needle, said:

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.

Florian Leibert, General Partner of 468 Capital, said:

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.

Needle is only a few months old but it has already gained significant traction - onboarding thousands of users and fostering a growing developer community in agent frameworks like Anthropic’s Claude MCP, Langchain, Langflow and Haystack.

The platform is accessible to organizations of all sizes, thanks to its user-friendly interface, data source integrations and free tier. Sign up for Needle and get started in minutes. Learn more at needle-ai.com.

It allows companies to implement AI solutions quickly, in areas such as customer support, compliance and internal knowledge management, without significant upfront investment.

The global artificial intelligence market size was estimated at almost $200bn in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 36.6% from 2024 to 2030. Needle is poised to capture some of this market by addressing inefficiencies in data accessibility and AI adoption.