Antfly Raises $2M Pre-Seed Led by Heavybit for Unified AI Retrieval Engine

Antfly Closes $2 Million Pre-Seed

Antfly, a Portland, Oregon-based company building a unified retrieval engine for AI agents and applications, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round. Heavybit led the round, with 8-Bit Capital also participating.

What Antfly Builds

Antfly's core product is a single database that runs vector, keyword, and graph search together. That combination matters because most AI systems today depend on retrieval across multiple modes — semantic similarity, exact term matching, and relationship traversal — but typically require separate systems for each.

The engine includes several capabilities beyond search itself:

• Built-in reranking
• Inference
• Memory
• Permission-checked access

By consolidating these functions, Antfly aims to remove the integration work that teams otherwise take on when assembling a retrieval stack.

The Problem It Targets

According to the company, its target is the gap where teams stitch together five or six separate databases and search tools to feed their AI systems. Each additional component adds latency, operational overhead, and failure modes — and keeping permissions consistent across them is difficult.

Antfly's pitch is that one engine handling vector, keyword, and graph retrieval, with reranking and permission checks built in, is a simpler foundation for AI agents and applications.

Founding Team

Antfly was co-founded by James McDermott and AJ Roetker, both veterans of Lytics, a customer data platform. That background is relevant to the problem: customer data platforms are fundamentally about unifying disparate data sources and making them queryable under access controls — the same set of concerns Antfly now applies to AI retrieval.

Product and Availability

The core engine runs free as a self-hosted download. A managed cloud service is in development. That two-track approach lets teams evaluate and run Antfly on their own infrastructure while offering a hosted option for those who prefer not to operate it themselves.

Customer Traction

Visiting Media uses Antfly to index large media libraries for AI-powered search, according to the company. Media libraries are a demanding test case: large volumes of assets, varied metadata, and search queries that benefit from both semantic and keyword matching.

Why This Round Matters

The pre-seed gives Antfly capital to develop its engine and managed cloud service at a moment when demand for retrieval infrastructure for AI is growing. Heavybit's lead position is notable given the firm's focus on developer and infrastructure companies; 8-Bit Capital joins as an additional investor.

Key Facts

• Company: Antfly
• Founded by: James McDermott and AJ Roetker
• Headquarters: Portland, Oregon
• Round: Pre-Seed
• Amount: $2 million
• Lead investor: Heavybit
• Additional investor: 8-Bit Capital
• Product: Unified retrieval engine for vector, keyword, and graph search with built-in reranking, inference, memory, and permission-checked access
• Availability: Free self-hosted download; managed cloud service in development
• Named customer: Visiting Media