Backend Engineer at Channel3 | Y Combinator

Channel3: Building the Product Database for the Age of AI

Channel3 is building a complete database of every product on the internet. For decades, this goal remained elusive, but advancements in artificial intelligence have finally made it possible to structure the world’s complex and often messy product data at scale and at an affordable cost.

Our Vision: From In-Store to Online to AI-Native

We believe agentic commerce will become as vital as customary in-store and online channels – hence the name “Channel3.” Our plan is to become the central hub for agentic commerce, powering every AI transaction and capturing a percentage of the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). we envision Channel3 becoming as foundational to AI commerce as Stripe is to payments or Plaid is to fintech.

The Problem

Agentic commerce is currently hindered by inconsistent and inaccurate product data. As highlighted in “OpenAI’s Shopping ambitions Hit Messy Data Reality”, product data is often unreliable, and frequently, it doesn’t exist at all.

The Possibility

According to McKinsey estimates, the US B2C retail market coudl see up to $1 trillion in revenue from agentic commerce by 2030, with global projections reaching $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Realizing this future depends on access to high-quality product data.

The Team

Our team is led by Alex (CEO) and George (CTO),who have been friends since their first day at Duke. alex, a coder since age 9, launched his first company at 12 and recently spearheaded AI projects at studio.com, where the idea for Channel3 originated. George, who published research on automating astronomy with robots at 18, spent the last two years tackling big-data challenges at Palantir.

Joining them are founding engineers Evan and Ignacio. Both come from AWS, with Evan holding a masters in CS from Penn and having built the first working exmaple of agentic commerce.Ignacio studied CS at Duke alongside Alex and George and previously worked on agentic commerce at AWS.

We are a fully-engineering team focused on rapid advancement and deployment.

Please note: We are currently unable to sponsor visas and require authorization to work in the US.

Our Progress So Far

* Indexed over 100 million products
* 1,500+ developers are actively using our API
* currently scoping pilot programs with key enterprise customers
* Established partnerships with tens of thousands of brands through affiliate network integrations.

What You’ll Do

* Develop code to understand 1 billion products. We integrate cutting-edge language, embedding, image, and segmentation models to achieve a comprehensive understanding of each product.
* Product pages exhibit significant variation across retailers. We’ve developed a computer-vision system capable of…