Tavily, a New York-based startup building infrastructure to connect AI agents to the web, has raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $25 million.
The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from earlier investors.
From open-source hack to enterprise platform
Tavily was founded by Rotem Weiss, a data scientist who originally launched the project as GPT Researcher in 2023. The open-source tool allowed AI agents to fetch real-time web data before ChatGPT offered native browsing. It quickly went viral, amassing 20,000 GitHub stars and validating developer demand.
Tavily has since evolved into a full-fledged enterprise solution, offering tooling that allows companies to safely deploy autonomous agents for search, data extraction, and decision-making — all with built-in compliance, governance, and risk management layers.
“Governance, risk, and compliance are non-negotiable in enterprise AI,” said George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners. “Tavily solves a critical problem as agent use cases scale.”
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Already powering agents at Cohere, MongoDB, and Groq
Tavily’s platform is being used by leading AI-first organizations like Cohere, Groq, MongoDB, and Writer. It helps their internal agents crawl public and private web sources, synthesize information, and deliver structured insights — all while respecting company policies.
The platform addresses a core issue: most LLM-based agents today lack the ability to access or interpret live data safely. Tavily bridges that gap with real-time search infrastructure and a compliance-first agent interface.
Building the internet layer for the next billion agents
While the AI agent space is still nascent, the startup believes its future is massive — with billions of agents eventually performing work autonomously across industries. Its primary competitors include Exa.ai (backed by Lightspeed, Nvidia, and YC) and other emerging players like Firecrawl.
Weiss says the focus now is on expanding adoption among enterprise AI teams, while continuing to grow its developer ecosystem.
“Most agents still aren’t connected to the web,” he said. “The company is building the infrastructure to change that — safely and at scale.”
