Berlin-based Needle, an AI-powered search and agent development platform, has raised €2 million Seed funding to expand their engineering team, strengthen its core technology, and accelerate its go-to-market initiatives.
The round was led by 468 Capital and Presight Capital.
Jan Heimes, CEO, and Co-founder of Needle said: “Organisations are sitting on goldmines of data current AI systems simply cannot tap into. Our platform provides the foundation for organisations to understand, identify and quickly leverage their existing data assets and build powerful AI applications with just a few clicks.”
Founded in 2024 by Onur Eken and Jan Heimes, Needle focuses on accessing valuable information ‘locked away’ in inaccessible legacy systems, fragmented structures, and siloed storage that traditional AI solutions struggle to process. A lack of accessibility, Needle argues, creates inefficiencies, communication bottlenecks and prevents organisations from benefiting from the power of AI.
Eken has led engineering teams at Everstores and helped scale Delivery Hero and Celonis while Heimes has worked as a data engineer at Climeworks and Notable Labs (YC 2015).
The founders experienced the inefficiencies of siloed data in their respective industries and now want to democratise AI adoption and transform every organisation to AI-enabled one.
Needle addresses the challenge by giving organisations instant, seamless and universal access to the data – in documents, notes, files – through a unified search layer which can scan all internal systems, from Gmail to Confluence and Github.
Users connect existing tools such as Confluence, Slack, Gmail, and Dropbox to Needle’s platform, which then indexes their data, making it instantly searchable and accessible. Through a web interface or API, users can retrieve answers and insights, automate workflows, and build powerful context-aware AI agents, all without deep technical expertise.
The platform’s agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology gives direct, clear answers and provides users with reliable information to boost productivity.
Needle ensures that they make implementing RAG technology in an agent framework easy, which can be a daunting challenge requiring time, expertise, and resources.
Florian Leibert, General Partner of 468 Capital, said: “Businesses and organisations 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.”
The platform is accessible to organisations of all sizes, thanks to its user-friendly interface, data source integrations and free tier.
It allows companies to implement AI solutions quickly, in areas such as customer support, compliance and internal knowledge management, without significant upfront investment.
