Czech-Slovak-founded TopK, a startup building a database to redefine how search works for both developers and AI agents, has secured €4.68M in seed funding from Earlybird, KAYA, Irregular Expressions, and several angel investors.
👯 Founders:Marek Galovič and Jerguš Lejko
📅 Founding year: 2024
🏭 Industry: AI infrastructure, search databases
💥 Problem: Traditional search systems and fragmented data infrastructure cannot meet the performance, flexibility, and scale requirements of AI-native applications.
📣 Solution: A hybrid AI-native search engine that unifies vector search, keyword matching, filtering, and ranking in one platform — designed specifically for developers and AI agents.
👥 Customers: Development teams working with large volumes of data in industries like e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and law.
🌱 Stage: Seed
💰 Investment amount: €4.68M
🚀 Funded by: Earlybird, KAYA, Irregular Expressions, and angel investors
👁️🗨️ Investor’s perspective:
“TopK has built the core of their database to deliver the fastest and most cost-effective hybrid search solution on the market – all with a small but exceptionally capable team. The investment will allow them to accelerate the development, deliver the enterprise-grade features, and succeed on a global scale,” says Karel Zheng from KAYA.
💡 It will be spent on: Expanding the team, especially in Prague, and enhancing the enterprise-grade capabilities of the platform.
💬 In their own words:
“Our goal is to become the unified query layer that powers search for the world’s most advanced apps.” — Jerguš Lejko
“Our platform provides a solution for developers and AI agents to unify structured and unstructured retrieval at scale.” — Marek Galovič
💪 Their specialty: Deep technical expertise in building large-scale AI and search systems, with strong roots in cloud infrastructure and distributed databases.
🔑 Business model: B2B enterprise software — offering a cloud-native search platform to organizations with demanding search and data retrieval needs.
👩🏫 Market: Companies leveraging AI or handling complex data environments — including sectors like law, healthcare, finance, and e-commerce.
📊 Traction: Backed by leading VCs; platform supports high-performance, customizable retrieval in production environments.
⚡ Competitors: Weaviate, Pinecone, Vespa, Elasticsearch (for hybrid use cases)
