Antfly Raises $2 Million Led by Heavybit to Build the Retrieval Engine for AI
Unifying an organization's scattered context in one secure, governed layer for AI agents
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Antfly today announced $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Heavybit, with participation from 8-Bit Capital. Antfly’s retrieval engine is available today for self-hosting, and organizations can join the waitlist for Antfly Cloud, its fully managed service.
Just as databases became the foundation for applications, retrieval engines will become the foundation for AI agents.
Context becomes useful to an agent only when it is found, ranked, permissioned, and current. Without a retrieval engine, teams must assemble that capability from vector and graph databases, rerankers, inference, memory, and synchronization pipelines. Antfly replaces that fragmented stack with one engine.
“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. Nobody maintains a retrieval pipeline anymore, and nobody misses it.”
“While AI agents have made immense strides in coding, much of the rest of the enterprise lags frustratingly behind,” said Joe Ruscio, General Partner at Heavybit. “Elsewhere, information is scattered across structured and unstructured systems, with nothing indexing the right context at the right time. This is the ‘retrieval gap,’ and Antfly closes it with lexical, semantic, and graph retrieval in one framework, fine-grained access controls, and deployment in your own environment. James and AJ previously built data systems at billion-profile scale at Lytics, and that experience guides Antfly’s design and ergonomics. Heavybit is proud to back them from the start.”
Self-host Antfly at https://antfly.io/download or join the Antfly Cloud waitlist at https://antfly.io/cloud.
About Antfly
Antfly builds the retrieval engine for AI, replacing fragmented retrieval infrastructure while leaving organizations in control of their data and deployment. Founded by James McDermott and AJ Roetker in Portland, Oregon. Learn more at https://antfly.io.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260917473487/en/
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