Czech startup TopK raises €4.6 million to build an AI-native search engine for enterprises

Prague-based TopK, a query-engine helping developers and AI agents search data, announced today they have secured €4.6 million in Seed funding to expand the team and build out TopK’s enterprise offering to support web-scale search use cases.

The round saw participation from Earlybird, KAYA, Irregular Expressions, and several angel investors.

“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.

TopK was founded in 2024 by Marek Galovič and Jerguš Lejko, who have known each other since high school. After years of working on large-scale systems and AI tools, they reunited again to reimagine search from the ground up. Their goal was to provide teams with a unified platform for relevant and intelligent search across all their data – without the need to connect multiple databases, APIs, or ranking systems.

TopK’s purpose-built query engine aims to give teams deep control over retrieval and ranking – enabling fast and high-quality search in large-scale production environments.

The cloud-native platform combines vector search, keyword matching, filtering, and flexible ranking in a single system. This allows teams to fine-tune results for their specific domain and use case, for example, in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, or law.

“We are changing the way data is searched and building a platform tailored for development  teams that work with large volumes of data and demand high performance, flexibility, and cost efficiency. Our goal is to become the unified query layer that powers search for the world’s most advanced apps. That’s why we welcome design partnerships that challenge us with technically demanding problems and help us push the product even further,” adds Jerguš Lejko, CTO and Co-founder of TopK.

In the future, TopK plans to expand its platform’s capabilities with natural language understanding and support for unstructured and multi-modal data. This will allow the startup to move beyond a traditional search database and reportedly deliver truly intelligent search.

“Companies are facing the limitations of current search systems. TopK brings a fundamental shift in how infrastructure is built, along with a deep understanding of the problems that development teams face every day. That’s why we support their vision to create a search system for the AI era,” says Andre Retterath, General Partner at Earlybird.

With the emergence of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), the demand for vector databases has skyrocketed. However, TopK says that most companies still rely on fragmented infrastructure and legacy tools that aren’t built to handle AI-native search workloads. TopK looks to solve this problem with a “true hybrid retrieval” approach that combines vector search, keyword matching, and filtering in an unified engine.

“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,” adds Karel Zheng from KAYA.

Even though TopK has headquarters in San Francisco, the development is carried out primarily in Europe, due to the “high quality of technical talent“.

According to the Founders, Europe is home to a strong community of people with experience in building databases, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. In addition, local developers have a strong knowledge of the key technologies, such as Rust or Kubernetes.

“We are currently building a team in Prague and looking for more developers and platform engineers who aren’t afraid of complex systems, understand the broader context, and are eager to help build the new generation of search from the ground up. We’re looking not only for domain experts, but also for technical leaders who can take ownership of one of our key verticals and drive its development across the entire platform,” concludes Lejko.

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