Information discovery and workflow automation startup Needle has secured $2.2 million Seed funding to help organisations unlock the potential of AI through its data search and agent development platform.
Valuable information is 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 organisations from benefiting from the power of AI.
Berlin and San Francisco-based company Needle addresses the challenge by giving organisations instant, seamless and universal access to the data — in documents, notes, and files —- through a unified search layer which can scan all internal systems.
Needle 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 previously 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 democratise AI adoption and transform every organisation to AI-enabled one.
With Needle, users connect existing tools such as Confluence, Slack, Gmail, and GitHub 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.
Jan Heimes, CEO, and co-founder of Needle, said:
"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.”
468 Capital and Presight Capital led the funding.
Florian Leibert,*General Partner of 468 Capital, said:
“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.”
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 funding will expand Needle’s engineering team, strengthen its core technology, and accelerate its go-to-market initiatives.
Lead image: Needle. Photo: uncredited.
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