Antfly, a Portland startup building software to streamline how artificial intelligence systems access corporate data, announced Thursday that it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by venture capital firm Heavybit, with participation from 8-Bit Capital.
The company is tackling what developers call the “Retrieval Gap” — the disconnect between the information an AI agent needs to answer a query and what current search systems actually deliver.
When an AI agent handles a complex task, like investigating a customer refund, it must simultaneously search real-time account data, recent policy changes, and old support emails. Today, software teams typically stitch together five or six separate databases and search tools to fetch those scattered records.
Antfly says it replaces that fragmented setup with a single engine and unified API, allowing agents to retrieve grounded, permission-checked data instantly without developers having to maintain a complex pipeline.
Antfly is the third Portland-based startup for CEO and co-founder James McDermott, who previously founded the customer data platform Lytics, which was acquired last year. Drawing on their experience building data platforms at a scale of billions of profiles, McDermott and co-founder AJ Roetker designed Antfly to eliminate the heavy operational burden developers face when building custom retrieval stacks from scratch.
“Every AI team eventually builds the same retrieval stack,” McDermott said in a news release. “Search. Vectors. Graphs. Rerankers. Inference. Memory. Glue code. We don’t think developers actually want six retrieval systems. We think they’re assembling them because the retrieval engine hasn’t existed. That’s what we’re building.”
The practical impact is already playing out for one customer: Visiting Media, a Portland-based immersive sales platform for the hospitality industry.
Before adopting Antfly, CTO Eric Sniff said his team tried building a custom retrieval system in-house, describing the process as “like pushing through mud.”
Using Antfly, a small team of three engineers at Visiting Media indexed more than 100 terabytes of media and text in under 24 hours. That infrastructure now powers an AI agent capable of pulling exact visual and textual assets from their library to build custom digital sales proposals for clients in under a minute.
“None of it was the product we actually wanted to build,” Sniff said of their previous DIY setup. “With Antfly, the team was experimenting within days — trying new indexes and different models. Nobody maintains a retrieval pipeline anymore, and nobody misses it.”
Antfly, which currently employs six engineers working out of a Kiln co-working space Kiln in Southeast Portland, will use the fresh capital to expand its product engineering team and scale support for customers deploying the retrieval engine in production.
The core software is currently available as a free, self-hosted engine for developers to run locally or in private environments, with a fully managed cloud service currently in waitlist status.
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