Every once in a while, a startup pops out of New York with the kind of ambition that makes the rest of the ecosystem sit up like someone just cranked the volume at 3 AM. Channel3 is that kind of spark. The company just closed a $6M seed round led by Matrix, with Ludlow Ventures, Pioneer Fund, Paul Graham, Sri Batchu, and Matteo Franceschetti stepping in to fuel a vision that feels less like a roadmap and more like a pressure wave hitting the future of commerce. When investors call a market a generational opportunity, most people hear hype. Channel3 hears homework due yesterday.
Co-founder and CEO Alexander Schiff did not stumble into this problem by accident. He was building an AI tutor meant to recommend products, only to discover that the internet’s product data is basically a junk drawer scattered across 1,000 different merchants and formats. Co-founder and CTO George Lawrence knew the technical weight of turning that chaos into order, and together they set out to build something the industry has been pretending did not need to exist. Call it timing, call it instinct, or call it Duke alumni refusing to wait their turn. Whatever the label, Channel3 is stitching together a universal product graph designed to give AI agents real visibility into what can be bought, where it lives, and how to connect the dots without merchants jumping through flaming hoops.
The catalog already covers 50M products and expands daily. That scale is not a flex, it is the price of admission for agentic commerce, the arena where 1 in 3 shoppers already asks AI for product recommendations. Developers get a real-time API, product matching powered by multimodal AI, attribution that actually pays them, and a storefront-agnostic way to build experiences that do not depend on pleasing Amazon or Google. Merchants get visibility in a world shifting from search boxes to AI intermediaries, which is the kind of move that separates the prepared from the nostalgic.
This funding gives Channel3 the compute power and engineering muscle to push toward indexing every product on the internet. A bold ambition, sure, but ambition is the currency of the companies that end up defining eras instead of reacting to them. What Alexander Schiff and George Lawrence are building is not a convenience layer. It is infrastructure for the next wave of commerce, where AI is not a plugin but the primary gateway between intent and purchase.
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