Tavily Secures $25M to Revolutionize Web Access for AI Agents

Tavily raises $25M to connect AI agents to the web | TechCrunch

Companies across many industries are implementing AI agents for internal use, automating a wide range of tasks. In the financial sector, AI agents are critical for fraud detection. They can analyze vast amounts of transaction data in real time. Meanwhile, sales organizations are using AI agents to gather data on potential customers. These AI sales agents can scour the web and social media for information. To be effective, these agents need to access the internet and find information from relevant sources, all while following company policies and mirroring how a human researcher would work. Connecting an agent directly to a large language model like ChatGPT without company-specific safeguards can lead to highly inappropriate results. "Governance, risk and compliance at the enterprise is so important now, and if you just let that happen, it's just going to be the wild, wild west," George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch. That's why Insight Partners led a $20 million Series A in Tavily, a startup that connects AI agents to the web in a way that's compliant with company-specific policies. The investment brings the one-year-old Tavily's total funding to $25 million. Founded last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, Tavily began as an open-source project he created in 2023 called GPT Researcher. The consumer-focused project fetched real-time web data before ChatGPT was hooked up to the internet, Weiss told TechCrunch. "It went extremely viral, so pretty fast we gained almost 20,000 GitHub stars." Weiss launched Tavily after ChatGPT and other LLMs introduced web search. Unlike GPT Researcher, Tavily focuses on enterprise clients. It provides a suite of tools to companies like Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer, allowing their agents to search, crawl, and extract structured insights from both public and private sources. While most AI agents aren't yet connected to the internet, Weiss says Tavily's goal is to onboard the next billion agents to the web. Tavily is not the only startup providing search tools for AI agents. It competes with Exa, which raised a $17 million Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and YC last year. Another smaller startup that offers a web search connectivity layer is Firecrawl. OpenAI and Perplexity are also offering search solutions that are geared towards independent developers.

Tavily raises $25M to expand real-time web access infrastructure for AI agents - SiliconANGLE

Tavily raises $25M to expand real-time web access infrastructure for AI agents Web access layer for artificial intelligence agents startup Tavily Inc. announced today that it had raised $25 million in funding, including $20 million in a Series A round, to double its headcount, expand its go-to-market efforts, deepen partnerships and enhance its real-time search infrastructure for AI agents. Founded in 2024, Tavily is building search infrastructure for AI agents to access and interact with real-time web and enterprise data. The company has as its mission to solve the challenges of agentic search by enabling large language models and AI agents to retrieve accurate, current and contextually relevant information from both public and private sources. Tavily's platform acts as an interface between AI systems and the web, allowing developers to easily integrate powerful search capabilities into their applications. It does so through the provision of a developer-friendly application programming interface that combines high-performance search, intelligent crawling and structured web page extraction, allowing AI agents to go beyond static, pre-trained knowledge by being able to access up-to-date content from the internet or organizational databases. The company's offering differs from traditional search APIs by being designed specifically for AI use cases, injecting clean, structured data directly into the context windows of large language models. The result drastically reduces the likelihood of hallucinations and outdated answers, key hurdles in production-grade AI systems. While relatively young, Tavily has already found success with a growing customer base that includes AI companies and enterprises, including Fortune 500 firms and fast-growing startups. Notable customers include Cohere Inc., MongoDB Inc., Groq Inc., IBM Corp., Monday.com Ltd., LangChain Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. "We're on a mission to onboard the next billion AI agents to the web," explains Rotem Weiss, chief executive officer of Tavily. "Building agentic web infrastructure is uniquely challenging, especially when these agents serve mission-critical applications. That's why we built an architecture that generates unique economies of scale: a system that becomes smarter and faster the more it is utilized." The Series A round was led by Insight Partners LP and Alpha Wave Global Management Ltd. "Tavily is building one of the leading web infrastructures for enterprises to have a trusted, auditable gateway for their agentic systems," said George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners. "It's been impressive to see how quickly Tavily has become essential to building compound AI systems at scale."