Tel Aviv-based startup tESTIMONY emerged from the hidden now with a $73 million seed round for an ambitious, but quixotic mission: to bring digital documents beyond the standard formats used by most businesses — .PDF, .docx, collaborative cloud files like Google Docs — and into the age of intelligence.

For Matan Gavish, the Founder and CEO of Factify, this isn’t just a software upgrade—it’s an inevitability that has haunted him for years.

"PDF was created when I was in elementary school," Gavish told VentureBeat. "The fundamentals of the software ecosystem haven’t really developed yet… someone has to redesign the digital document itself."

Gavish, a tenured professor of computer science and Stanford PhD, admits that his fixation on administrative file formats is an anomaly for someone with his credentials.

"This is a bad problem to think about," he said. "Due to the fact that my academic background is in AI and machine learning, my mom wanted me to start an AI company because it was cool. I don’t know why I was disgusted and then possessed by the documents."

But that obsession has now attracted a massive seed round led by Valley Capital Partners and backed by AI heavyweights like former Google AI chief John Giannandrea.

The bet is simply the static rigidity of most digital files that limit their use, and a better, more intelligent document that actually shares its history of editing and ownership with users as intended, is not only possible – it’s a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.

The history of digital documents

To understand why a seed round can grow to $73 million, you need to understand the size of trap businesses. There are currently an estimated three trillion PDFs in circulation. "Some people see PDF more than their children," Gavish jokes.

The history of the digital document is not a linear progression where one format replaces another. Rather, it is a story of "speciation," where different formats have evolved to fill distinct ecological niches: production, distribution, and collaboration.

The era of files: Microsoft Word (1980s–1990s)

Digital documents began as isolated artifacts. In the 1980s, the "DOCUMENTS" inextricably linked to the hardware that creates it. A file created in WordPerfect on a DOS machine is effectively gibberish to a Macintosh user.

Microsoft Word, following its line of pioneering WYSIWYG editors at Xerox PARC, changed this by leveraging the dominance of the Windows operating system. In the 1990s, the binary .doc format became the default container for editable professional documents. However, these files are complex in structure "memory dumps" designed for limited hardware at the time, which often leads to corruption or privacy leaks where the deleted text remains hidden in the binary data of the file.

The digital ‘rock’ age: the PDF (1990s-2006)

PDF did not originate as a writing tool; it is a tool for visualization. In 1991, Adobe co-founder John Warnock wrote the "Project Camelot" white paper, imagining a "digital envelope" which looks the same on any display or printer.

Unlike Word files, which are malleable, PDFs are designed to be immutable. They use the PostScript imaging model to place characters in precise coordinates, ensuring visual fidelity. While adoption was slow at first, Adobe’s 1994 decision to release Acrobat Reader for free built PDF as the global standard for "digital concrete"—the finality format used for contracts, government forms, and archives.

The collaborative cloud docs era (2006-present)

In 2006, Google disrupted the model again by moving the document from the hard drive to the browser. use "Change in Operation" algorithm, Google Docs allows multiple users to edit the same text stream simultaneously.

It shifts the paradigm from "send a file" on "share a link." While Google Workspace now claims more than 3 billion users (mostly consumers and education), it fundamentally changes how we work—making documents living, collaborative processes rather than static artifacts.

The status quo: fragmentation

Despite these advances, the business world remains fragmented. We draft in Google Docs (the "Digital Stream"), Word format (the "Digital Clay"), and signing the PDF (the "Digital Rock").

But this division comes at a cost. "The problem is not the document. It’s all around it," company notes. "Once a PDF leaves your system, control is gone. The versions drifted. Access is not clear. Nothing to see."

The transformation of digital documents into intelligent infrastructure

Factify’s bet is that in the age of AI, this divide is no longer annoying—it’s a critical failure. AI models need structured, verifiable data to work.

When an AI "read" a PDF, it is essentially guessing, using optical character recognition to scrape text from what is effectively a digital photo.

"What we are dealing with here is a megalomaniac vision, but it is at the same time perhaps something inevitable," Gavish said.

Factify’s solution is to treat documents not as static files, but as intelligent infrastructure. on "Prove" standard, a document carries its own brain. It has a unique identity, a live authorization system, and an immutable audit log that travels with it.

"We are writing a new document format that replaces PostScript," Gavish explained. "We create a new layer of data that supports the document as a first-class citizen … and it is always available inside the organization and possibly outside."

This distinction—between a File and an API—is the core of the company’s pitch"

• The files are mandatory: They accumulate, disappear, and can be stolen. "It returns to the brick state," Gavish said. "File liabilities, if any, because they are just accumulated, you need to take care of them."

• APIs are properties: A Factify document is an active object. You can ask this: "Who saw you? When do you expire? Are you on the latest version?"

‘People don’t change’, but formats do

History is littered with formats that tried to replace PDF (such as Microsoft’s XPS). They fail because they demand too much behavioral change from users. Gavish knows this trap well.

"When I talk to business software entrepreneurs, I tell them two laws to know about starting a business software company that people ignore, and nothing changes," he said.

To top it off, Factify has built in deep backwards compatibility. A Factified document can look like a PDF, complete with page breaks and margins. Users don’t need to learn a new interface to get value; they just need to solve a specific pain point—like an executive who wants to make sure an investment memo doesn’t get passed.

"All they have to say to their team is, ‘Dear Chief of Staff, employment agreements and investment memorandums … will be Factified. Others will continue,’" Gavish said. "They see immediate benefits… but then they realize they’ve crossed the Rubicon."

What’s next for Factify?

Capital from this round will be used to deepen the core engineering of the platform—which Gavish describes as a "heavy engineering lift" require them to rebuild the document format, data layer, and application layer from scratch. The company also established a major operational hub in Pittsburgh to support its US expansion.

Ultimately, Factify isn’t trying to create another collaboration tool like Google Docs. They are trying to establish an unchangeable record of the future—the standard for "truth" in a digital world.

"PDF… has become such a standard that I can’t file my taxes using any other format. This is what victory looks like," Gavish said. "We have created a standard document that is not specifically for health care or for insurance, but as a document."

For the three trillion static files currently sitting in cloud storage, the writing may finally be on the wall.

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