TinyFish announced this week that they raised $47 million in Series A funding led by ICONIQ Capital, alongside backers including USVP, MongoDB Ventures, and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. With a 25-person team and early deployments at companies such as Google and DoorDash, TinyFish is positioning itself as one of the more ambitious entrants in the growing market for autonomous software agents.
In early 2024, Sudheesh Nair, Keith Zhai, and Shuhao Zhang set out to solve a problem that had frustrated enterprises for years: the difficulty of extracting and acting on information buried across the constantly shifting terrain of the internet. Their answer was TinyFish. The Palo Alto startup that builds what it calls “enterprise web agents,” software designed to simulate human browsing behavior but at a scale and speed no human workforce could match.
Automating the Messy Web
Enterprises in sectors like retail, travel, and logistics have long relied on offshore teams or fragile scripts to monitor competitor prices, aggregate inventory, or surface real-time availability across their systems. Those solutions often broke when a site’s design changed or struggled to keep up with scale.
TinyFish’s agents are designed to navigate that complexity. “If you can turn the internet into analyzable data, it will fundamentally give businesses advantages that others don’t have,” Nair told Reuters. The platform uses AI models for reasoning and exploration, then codifies what it learns into repeatable workflows executed at massive scale.
One example is Google Hotels, which has used TinyFish agents to aggregate inventory from thousands of small Japanese inns that lacked the infrastructure to connect directly with global booking platforms. Another involves a rideshare company collecting millions of price points each month to adjust fares dynamically. For e-commerce companies, agents track promotions, inventory levels, and shipping times across thousands of retail sites.
A Crowded Field
The appeal of autonomous web agents has drawn a range of well-capitalized competitors. Adept, a San Francisco startup building AI agents to operate across software applications, has raised more than $400 million from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia. Inflection AI, co-founded by DeepMind veteran Mustafa Suleyman before he joined Microsoft, has focused on personal digital assistants but is expanding into enterprise automation. Other players such as Cognition and MultiOn are experimenting with agents that can carry out multi-step reasoning across online environments.
Unlike TinyFish, which emphasizes workflow reliability, compliance features, and enterprise-scale deployment, many of these rivals remain focused on consumer or developer-first use cases. Still, the underlying technologies: goal-based reasoning models, adaptive browsing, and persistent memory, are converging quickly.
That focus on enterprise execution has won TinyFish early pilot projects with demanding customers. ICONIQ partner Amit Agarwal said his firm invested after seeing TinyFish succeed at “productionizing” the technology for two large-scale customers “who have all the development resources in-house to build these types of things themselves”. The company says its agents are already running hundreds of thousands of workflows monthly across industries including hospitality, transportation, and retail.
Nair, who previously served as CEO of ThoughtSpot, has framed TinyFish as a category-creating company. “Helping those companies get more value from the web isn’t about automating low-value tasks. It’s about amplifying the high-value, outcome-driven processes that require human-like interaction at scale,” he said.
With the new funding, TinyFish says it has a three- to four-year runway to expand both its technology platform and its go-to-market operations. The challenge will be sustaining differentiation as competitors introduce their own agent platforms and customers test whether the technology delivers measurable returns.
The opportunity, however, is significant. If TinyFish and others in the space can make the internet a dependable substrate for structured business operations, they would shift how enterprises interact with the web.
