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

The rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence is witnessing a surge in the implementation of AI agents across diverse industries, tasked with automating a wide array of operations.

In the financial sector, AI agents are proving indispensable for robust fraud detection, capable of analyzing vast volumes of transaction data in real-time. Concurrently, sales organizations are leveraging these intelligent agents to gather critical data on potential customers, with AI sales agents actively scouring the web and social media for pertinent information.

For these AI agents to function effectively and safely, they require seamless access to the internet to retrieve information from relevant sources. Crucially, this access must be governed by company-specific policies, mimicking the methodical approach of a human researcher.

Without adequate safeguards, directly connecting an AI agent to a large language model like ChatGPT can yield highly inappropriate and unreliable 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,” stated George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners.

Addressing this critical need, Insight Partners has spearheaded a $20 million Series A funding round for Tavily, a startup focused on connecting AI agents to the web in a manner compliant with enterprise-specific policies. This significant investment brings the total funding for the one-year-old Tavily to $25 million.

Founded last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, Tavily’s origins trace back to an open-source project called GPT Researcher, which Weiss launched in 2023. Even before ChatGPT was integrated with internet search capabilities, GPT Researcher fetched real-time web data and achieved considerable viral success, garnering nearly 20,000 GitHub stars.

Following the introduction of web search functionalities in LLMs, Weiss pivoted Tavily to focus on enterprise clients. The company now provides a suite of tools to major players like Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer, empowering their AI agents to search, crawl, and extract structured insights from both public and private data sources.

While many AI agents are not yet equipped with internet connectivity, Tavily aims to facilitate the onboarding of the next billion AI agents to the web. The startup operates in a competitive space, with rivals such as Exa, which secured $17 million in a Series A round from prominent investors like Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator last year. Other competitors include smaller startups like Firecrawl, as well as offerings from industry giants like OpenAI and Perplexity, which cater to independent developers.