Needle Seed Round, March 2025

Needle, a San Francisco and Berlin-based AI-powered search and agent development platform, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding. The funding round was led by 468 Capital and Presight Capital, both investors known for their focus on enterprise software and deep technology. The investment will be used to expand the company’s engineering team, enhance its core technology, and accelerate its go-to-market initiatives.

Needle was founded to address a common challenge in modern enterprises: accessing valuable data that is locked within legacy systems, fragmented structures, and siloed storage. Many AI solutions struggle to process this information efficiently, creating bottlenecks in communication and preventing organizations from fully leveraging AI capabilities. Needle provides a unified search layer that allows businesses to access and understand structured and unstructured data, regardless of its format or source.

The company’s platform enables organizations to connect existing tools such as Gmail, Slack, Confluence, and Dropbox. Once connected, the platform indexes the data, making it instantly searchable and accessible. Users can retrieve answers, generate insights, automate workflows, and build context-aware AI agents through a web interface or API. The system is designed to function without requiring deep technical expertise, making AI-powered solutions more accessible to businesses of all sizes.

At the core of Needle’s platform is its agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology. This approach ensures that users receive direct, clear, and reliable information, improving productivity by integrating AI-powered search and automation capabilities. RAG technology is often complex to implement within an agent framework, requiring significant time, expertise, and resources. Needle simplifies this process, allowing organizations to build and deploy AI agents more efficiently.

Needle was founded by Jan Heimes and Onur Eken, who serve as the company’s CEO and CTO, respectively. Heimes has worked as a data engineer at Climeworks and Notable Labs, while Eken has led engineering teams at Everstores and contributed to scaling Delivery Hero and Celonis. Both founders have firsthand experience with the inefficiencies caused by siloed data and aim to democratize AI adoption by providing businesses with a straightforward solution.

Speaking about the company’s vision, CEO Jan Heimes stated, “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 at 468 Capital, highlighted the importance of making AI adoption more accessible, stating, “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.”

Despite being only a few months old, Needle has already gained traction, onboarding thousands of users and fostering a growing developer community. The platform is being utilized within agent frameworks such as Anthropic’s Claude MCP, Langchain, Langflow, and Haystack. It is accessible to a wide range of organizations due to its user-friendly interface, integration with multiple data sources, and a free-tier offering.

By enabling companies to implement AI-driven solutions quickly, Needle’s platform supports various applications, including customer support, compliance, and internal knowledge management. The platform reduces the need for significant upfront investment, making AI implementation feasible for businesses that may not have extensive technical resources.

The artificial intelligence market continues to expand, with its global size estimated at nearly $200 billion in 2023 and projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 36.6% from 2024 to 2030. Needle aims to capture a portion of this market by addressing inefficiencies in data accessibility and AI adoption, positioning itself as a key player in enterprise AI solutions.