Czech-Slovak-founded startup TopK secures $5.5M in seed funding to enhance AI-powered search for businesses

TopK, a Czech-Slovak-founded startup building a database to redefine how search works for both developers and AI agents, has secured $5.5M in seed funding from Earlybird, KAYA, Irregular Expressions, and several angel investors, Startup Kitchen reports.

About TopK

• TopK is a cloud-native platform, founded in 2024 by Marek Galovič and Jerguš Lejko, and based in San Francisco. It is designed to enhance search capabilities with advanced AI-powered query understanding, vector search, and adaptive ranking.

• TopK aims to provide businesses in industries like e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and law with a unified search solution. The platform simplifies data access by integrating multiple search functions into one system, allowing teams to fine-tune results for their specific needs.

“The database market is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The boom in AI-native products is pushing the limits of traditional search systems, which no longer meet current demands. Our platform addresses this shift in the market and provides a solution for developers and AI agents to unify structured and unstructured retrieval at scale,” says Marek Galovič, CEO and co-founder of TopK.

Investment details 

The funding round was backed by Earlybird, KAYA, Irregular Expressions, and several angel investors.

• Earlybird Venture Capital is a European venture capital firm focusing on early-stage investments in high-growth technology companies. Earlybird primarily invests in startups within the sectors of deep tech, software, and digital innovation, with a particular emphasis on companies with the potential for global expansion.

• KAYA VC is a Czechia-based venture capital firm investing in founders from CEE, predominantly Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, and diaspora. KAYA invests in seed to early-stage companies in software, healthcare, and SaaS industries. The company portfolio includes: Booksy, Jutro Medical, Digitoo and Supernova.

• Irregular Expressions is an early-stage fund backed by 80+ engineering leaders at prominent tech companies. It invests at pre-seed and seed in founders building for engineering, data, and AI teams, infrastructure software, developer tools, security, MLOps.

The funds will be used to expand the team and build out TopK’s enterprise offering to support web-scale search use cases.