TEL AVIV, Israel (chatnewstv.com) — On the left arm of Prof. Matan Gavish is a tattoo of a five-pointed star the orbital pattern of Venus as seen from Earth. It is, he says, a reminder of forces stronger than human will.
“Venus is a force that can capture your attention, redirect your desire toward something beautiful, and make you forget everything else,” said Gavish, a mathematician-turned-entrepreneur and founder of startup Factify.
“If I’m shown something interesting, I go all the way in. But now I’ve committed to a mission of at least ten years. I’m negotiating with that force not to turn my head elsewhere.”
At 46, the world-renowned academic cuts an unconventional figure in Israel’s tech sector — earrings, tattoos and a philosophical bent yet investors have backed his vision with unusual enthusiasm. Factify, founded in 2023 with roughly 40 employees, has raised $73 million across pre-seed and seed rounds to build what Gavish calls “the Tesla of documents”: an AI-native replacement for the ubiquitous PDF.
“The real revolution is bureaucracy that will no longer be handled by humans,” he said during an interview at the company’s offices in south Tel Aviv. “The goal is to free people from this inefficiency and burden. There will no longer be paperwork, because automation becomes an infrastructure layer.”
Documents that talk to each other
Gavish’s premise is straightforward but radical: replace static forms with intelligent documents that can exchange data autonomously and complete themselves.
“How many times can I write my ID number and address?” he asked.
“If forms are intelligent and know something about me, why can’t they fill themselves out? Maybe your insurance form calls you and asks if anything has changed. Why can’t my tax return submit itself? The information already exists.”
He likens the concept to music streaming. “If I want the best Bon Jovi songs, it happens instantly,” he said.
“That’s how documents should work. If the data exists, even if scattered, it can organize itself.”
The ambition puts Factify on a collision course with entrenched software giants such as Adobe, whose co-founder John Warnock invented the PDF in the early 1990s. Gavish speaks reverently of Warnock the company even marks his birthday while positioning Factify as a generational successor.
“What he did then, we want to do now,” Gavish said. “He reinvented the document for everyone. We’re trying to do the same for the AI era.”
A Stanford-forged obsession
The idea traces to Gavish’s doctoral work at Stanford University, where he studied statistics under renowned data scientist David Donoho. Amid the rise of cloud software, he expected documents to follow entertainment and media into streaming-like architectures.
“It didn’t happen,” he said. “The digital revolution raced ahead and left the world of documents behind.”
After returning to Israel, Gavish became a tenured professor and taught artificial intelligence, but the problem persisted in his mind for nearly a decade. “Until I gave in to what felt like destiny,” he said. “In 2023, I started the company. That’s what a life mission looks like.”
Elite academia to startup crucible
Raised in Haifa by a psychologist and an Intel engineer, Gavish described himself as a rebellious student who nearly dropped out of school. He later excelled academically, earning degrees from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University before entering Stanford’s highly selective statistics Ph.D. program.
“That’s like entering the Olympic arena,” he said. “You study alongside the smartest students from around the world.”
Yet his personal life proved far less orderly. A protracted divorce between 2015 and 2022, he said, left him financially and emotionally shattered.
“My life was broken into its smallest pieces,” he said. “No money, no friends, no structure, no hope.”
The crisis pushed him toward spiritual and physical disciplines yoga, hypnotherapy, martial arts and a search for meaning he says now informs his leadership.
“Starting a company requires all of you,” Gavish said. “Everything you know, believe, and are capable of. It’s like playing ten instruments at once.”
AI, ethics and the future of work
Beyond documents, Gavish argues the AI revolution demands a humanistic rethink of technology education and responsibility. He created a humanities course for computer science students exploring mythology, religion and ethics alongside algorithms.
“Each screw in the machine may do an excellent job,” he said, “but the machine as a whole could lead humanity toward disaster.”
He warns that pervasive data collection could enable “digital totalitarianism,” citing facial recognition and social-credit scenarios depicted in dystopian fiction.
You read Facebook, but it also reads you,” he said. “Technology in the hands of regimes without checks and balances can be dangerous.”
At Factify, he said, such concerns shape hiring and design. “We’re building technology that should strengthen truth and respect privacy,” he said. “So we need engineers with a strong ethical backbone.”
Betting on a bureaucratic revolution
Investors appear convinced. Gavish said Silicon Valley backers quickly grasped the scale of the opportunity: document-heavy industries such as insurance, banking and health care still rely on decades-old workflows.
“I’ve never met anyone who enjoys working with documents,” he said. “The pain is enormous.”
Factify aims to become the standard within five years making manual forms feel archaic. “We’re already there in a small way,” he said. “Soon it will seem absurd to do it the old way.”
For Gavish, whose mind leaps constantly between mathematics, mythology and product architecture, the mission feels both technological and personal.
“Insights never stop flowing,” he said. “I feel responsible for them. You can’t just put an idea on a shelf.”
As he spoke, he glanced at the Venus star etched on his arm, a symbol of distraction and desire and smiled.
“This time,” he said, “I’m staying with the idea until the end.”
This article was originally published on Calcalist
