Companies in many industries implement AI agents for internal use and automate a wide range of tasks.
In the financial sector, AI agents are essential for fraud detection. Analyze huge amounts of transactional data in real time. Meanwhile, sales organizations use AI agents to collect data about potential customers. These AI sales agents can scrutinize the web and social media for information.
To be effective, these agents need to access the internet and find information from relevant sources.
Connecting agents directly to large language models like ChatGPT without company-specific protection can lead to highly inappropriate outcomes.
“Enterprise governance, risk and compliance are very important right now. If you let it happen, it’s just going to be wild and wild West,” George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch.
That’s why Insight Partners led the $20 million Series A with Tavily. This is a startup that connects AI agents to the web in a way that complies with company-specific policies. The investment will bring the total funding of one-year-old Tavily to $25 million.
Founded last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, Tavily began in 2023 as an open source project called GPT Researchers. The consumer-oriented project retrieved real-time web data before ChatGPT was connected to the internet, Weiss told TechCrunch. “It went very viral. It was very fast and won 20,000 Github stars.”
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Weiss launched Tavily after ChatGpt and other LLMS introduced web search. Unlike GPT researchers, they focus on enterprise clients. It provides a set of tools for businesses like Groq, Cohere, Mongodb, Writer, and more, allowing agents to search, crawl and extract structured insights from both public and private sources.
While most AI agents are not connected to the internet yet, Weiss says Tavily’s goal is to bring the next billion agents into the web.
Tavily is not the only startup that provides search tools for AI agents. It competes with EXA, which last year raised a $17 million Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia and Y Combinator. Another small startup that provides a web search connection layer is FireCrawl. Openai and Perplexity also offer search solutions for independent developers.
