Funds for All-Internet Product Database Channel3

Early-stage VC fund Matrix, previously a backer of firms including Apple, FedEx, Canva and Oculus, has led a $6m injection of seed funds for Channel3, a US firm which is building a connected database of 'every product on the Internet.' Funds will help to grow the engineering team and boost product development.

The firm is developing infrastructure which will allow AI agents to help consumers find, compare and buy products. It notes that 'Today, Google, Amazon and ChatGPT own the agentic commerce channel because they own all the product data' - Channel3 aims to change that by building a comprehensive, real-time product database accessible to every merchant and developer. The catalog already includes 50 million products and is growing fast.

Co-founders Alexander Schiff and George Lawrence bring experience from work at Microsoft and Palantir. 'AI-driven shopping is only as powerful as the data it can act on,' says CEO Schiff. 'Developers building agentic commerce applications often get stuck on product data because collecting and maintaining it is too difficult and expensive. We handle the infrastructure layer, so developers can focus on building the best user experience.'

Lawrence, who serves as CTO, says multimodal AI models are now 'smart enough to understand products and inexpensive enough to operate at scale,' solving a bottleneck problem and leaving product data reliable, structured and actionable. The firm's API provides access to a real-time product catalog that connects products, variants, images, attributes and merchant offers across the web and allows any app or agent to search products, surface the best options and link users directly to merchants for purchase.

The round was joined by Ludlow Ventures and three angel investors. The firm is online at www.trychannel3.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.