Alexander Schiff
| Alexander Schiff | |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, software engineer |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder and CEO of Channel3 |
| Alma mater | Duke University |
Alexander Schiff is an American entrepreneur and software engineer. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Channel3, a startup building a universal product database and API designed to enable AI-driven commerce.[1] The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch.
Career
Schiff built an early professional foundation across a range of technology and finance roles. In 2020, he worked as a software engineering intern at IBM, followed in 2021 by a venture capital analyst internship at MizMaa Ventures. The following year he joined Microsoft as a product management intern. He co-founded a company called Hourlead in 2023, and spent roughly two years, from 2023 to 2025, working as a software engineer at a startup called Studio.[2]
Schiff attended Duke University, where he met his Channel3 co-founder George Lawrence. It was during his time at Studio that Schiff identified the problem Channel3 would eventually address: while building an AI tutor capable of recommending products and earning affiliate revenue, he found no existing service that could reliably surface comprehensive product data at scale. Finding no existing solution, he recruited Lawrence, who left a position at Palantir, to co-found Channel3.[3]
Channel3
Channel3 describes its mission as building "a database of every product on the internet." The company's API gives developers access to more than 100 million product listings, including real-time pricing and detailed metadata. It's not simply an aggregator. The platform uses image classification and reasoning models to match products across different merchants, recognize product variants, and return relevant search results. Channel3 positions its service as infrastructure for what it calls agentic commerce, a model in which AI agents discover, recommend, and purchase products on behalf of consumers without direct human input. The platform also includes built-in monetization, letting developers earn commissions on sales they generate through the API.[4][5]
In December 2025, Channel3 announced a $6 million seed funding round to continue building its product infrastructure.[6][7][8] The round was covered by multiple technology publications and drew attention to the broader question of how AI agents will interact with e-commerce infrastructure as autonomous shopping tools become more common. The company is based in New York.
References
- ↑ "Channel3 – The API for Agentic Commerce". 'Channel3}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3 Raises $6M to Make Every Product on the Internet Discoverable with AI". 'AlleyWatch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3 Raises $6M to Make Every Product on the Internet Discoverable with AI". 'AlleyWatch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3 – The API for Agentic Commerce". 'Channel3}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3 Raises $6M to Make Every Product on the Internet Discoverable with AI". 'AlleyWatch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3 Secures $6M Seed Funding to Build the Infrastructure Behind Agentic Commerce". 'PR Newswire}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3 Raises $6M to Make Every Product on the Internet Discoverable with AI". 'AlleyWatch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Channel3: $6 Million Seed Funding Raised To Build the Infrastructure Behind Agentic Commerce". 'Pulse 2.0}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.