A database infrastructure startup called Channel3 is building a catalog that it says will eventually list every single product available to buy across the entire internet, in order to make them discoverable by artificial intelligence chatbots.

The startup announced its goal after closing on a $6 million seed funding round today, led by Matrix. Ludlow Ventures and a number of angel investors participated in the round.

Channel3 says that the rise of AI agents is transforming the online shopping experience. Increasingly, consumers no longer go wading through the endless listings on platforms such as Amazon.com or eBay, but instead simply ask a tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini to find something suitable. AI agents potentially make shopping search far more convenient, helping consumers to find, compare and even purchase products on their behalf.

However, Channel3 says agentic shopping is currently the sole domain of giants such as Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc. and OpenAI Group PBC, because these companies own all of the product data that’s scattered across the web. This is what the startup is trying to change.

The company has developed an application programming interface that any developer, app or merchant can use to access a real-time product catalog that lists everything that’s currently up for sale online. It connects products, variants, images, attributes and special offers, and enables any app or AI agent to search through it, surface the best options based on the user’s prompt, and then link those users directly to the merchant so they can buy the product they choose.

Most important, Channel3’s product catalog and API are neutral and storefront-agnostic. It uses multimodal models to match users’ prompts with products from across every online store, identify alternatives, extract rich attributes and interpret product pages, so agents can always find the most suitable offering, regardless of the listing’s formatting.

Merchants will benefit by making their products more visible to applications and AI agents, Channel3 said. All they have to do is sync their own product catalog with Channel3’s database and their products will be made discoverable to the growing number of AI agents that cater to online shopping. Channel3 will take care of cleaning and structuring their product data in a way that AI agents can interpret and will make sure its own database is continuously updated to reflect any changes to the merchant’s offerings. It also provides tracking and affiliate infrastructure capabilities for sales attribution.

Channel3 co-founder and Chief Executive Alexander Schiff said he decided to build the company after discovering for himself how difficult it is to get AI agents to search for product listings. He said he was building an AI tutor application that would recommend products and earn affiliate revenue, only to realize that the infrastructure to support this kind of experience simply wasn’t there.

“AI-driven shopping is only as powerful as the data it can act on,” Schiff said. “Developers building agentic commerce applications often get stuck on product data because collecting and maintaining it is too difficult and expensive. We handle the infrastructure layer, so developers can focus on building the user experience.”

Already, Channel3’s catalog boasts more than 50 million products and continues to expand by the day. The funding from today’s round will help to grow the startup’s engineering team and build out the compute infrastructure it needs to process billions of tokens to facilitate user’s product searches.

Matrix Partner Kojo Osei said Channel3 is tackling a “generational opportunity” and believes it can become the foundational layer of agentic commerce. “It’s leading the charge in a massive emerging market,” he added.

Image: Channel3