Tavily Raises $25M to Connect AI Agents to the Internet

Numerous sectors are integrating AI agents into their internal processes, streamlining a wide range of tasks.

In the finance sector, AI agents are essential for identifying fraud by continuously analyzing large volumes of transaction data. Likewise, sales teams are utilizing AI agents to gather insights about prospective clients by exploring the web and social media for relevant information.

To function effectively, these agents need internet access to locate pertinent data while following company guidelines and emulating human research techniques.

Connecting an agent directly to a large language model like ChatGPT without appropriate company-specific safeguards could result in highly unsuitable outcomes.

“At the enterprise level, governance, risk, and compliance are more important than ever, and ignoring these elements will lead to disorder,” said George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, in an interview with TechCrunch.

This necessity prompted Insight Partners to lead a $20 million Series A funding round for Tavily, a startup created to align AI agents with the web while adhering to company regulations. This funding increases Tavily’s overall capital to $25 million within just a year of its founding.

Established last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, Tavily evolved from an open-source project he launched in 2023 known as GPT Researcher. This consumer-focused initiative collected real-time web data before ChatGPT’s internet integration, achieving rapid popularity with nearly 20,000 GitHub stars, according to Weiss in his comments to TechCrunch.

Weiss launched Tavily after the implementation of web search features in ChatGPT and other LLMs. Unlike GPT Researcher, Tavily focuses on corporate clients, offering a full range of tools for companies like Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer, empowering their agents to search, crawl, and extract organized insights from both public and private data sources.

While most AI agents are currently offline, Weiss highlights Tavily’s goal of connecting the next billion agents to the internet.

Tavily is not the only company providing search solutions for AI agents. It faces competition from Exa, which raised a $17 million Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator last year. A smaller rival in the web search connectivity space is Firecrawl. Additionally, OpenAI and Perplexity are delivering search options aimed at independent developers.