Oregon-Based Antfly Raises $2M in Pre-Seed Funding

The company plans to use the funding to expand its operations and business development efforts.

Antfly provides a retrieval engine designed to help AI agents find, rank, manage permissions for, and keep information current.

What is Antfly?

Antfly builds a retrieval engine for AI applications and agents.

The company says retrieval engines can provide the infrastructure AI agents need to access useful and relevant context.

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Without a dedicated retrieval engine, teams may need to combine vector and graph databases, rerankers, inference systems, memory tools and synchronization pipelines.

Antfly brings these capabilities together in a single engine while allowing organizations to maintain control over their data and deployment.

Its retrieval engine is currently available for self-hosting. The company is also accepting users on a waitlist for Antfly Cloud, its fully managed service.

How Much Funding Has Antfly Raised?

Antfly has raised $2 million in its Pre-Seed funding round.

The round was led by Heavybit, with participation from 8-Bit Capital.

The source does not provide details of any previous funding rounds.

Who Invested in Antfly’s Pre-Seed Round?

Heavybit led Antfly's $2 million Pre-Seed funding round.

8-Bit Capital also participated in the round.

Why the Funding Matters

Antfly will use the new funding to expand its operations and business development efforts.

The company plans to continue developing its retrieval technology while expanding access to its platform through self-hosting and its upcoming managed cloud service.

Who founded Antfly?

Antfly was founded by James McDermott and AJ (Andrew) Roetker.

The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

The source does not provide the company's founding year.

Leadership Comments

"Every AI team eventually builds the same retrieval stack with the same glue code," said James McDermott, CEO and co-founder of Antfly. "They're assembling it because the retrieval engine hasn't existed."

"We built a retrieval engine ourselves, and it was like pushing through mud," said Eric Sniff, CTO at Visiting Media, an AI-powered hospitality platform for immersive selling. "None of it was the product we actually wanted to build. With Antfly, the team was experimenting within days—trying new indexes and different models.

Market and Business Growth

Antfly's retrieval engine is available today for organizations that want to self-host the technology.

The company is also developing Antfly Cloud, a fully managed service that organizations can join through a waitlist.

Antfly is focused on replacing fragmented retrieval infrastructure with a single engine for AI applications while keeping organizations in control of their data and deployment.

What Happens Next?

Antfly plans to expand its operations and business development activities following the new funding.

The company will also continue developing its retrieval platform and work toward the launch of Antfly Cloud.

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