AI agents are getting smarter, faster, and more capable, but they are still terrible at browsing the internet. Tavily, a fast-growing startup built to fix that problem, just raised $25 million to keep pushing forward. The round includes $20 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global.
Tavily’s mission is simple: help AI agents access the internet like humans do—quickly, reliably, and with context that makes sense. It is building the infrastructure that lets AI tools get real-time, accurate results from the web, instead of depending on outdated training data or static knowledge bases.
Most AI systems rely on fixed or outdated data and struggle to stay updated unless designed for live information, while few platforms can effectively handle the web’s complexity. Traditional search engines serve humans by presenting lists of links for exploration, but AI agents perform best when they receive structured, ready-to-use data organized for immediate understanding.
Tavily addresses this by providing a search Application Programming Interface (API) that delivers exactly what AI agents need: real-time facts, summaries, and source links in a machine-friendly format, resulting in faster, more accurate, and more reliable outputs while also reducing hallucinations where AI systems invent information instead of retrieving it.
In its first year, Tavily has already seen strong growth. The platform has over 700,000 users and more than a million installations per month. It’s being used by major tech companies including AWS, IBM, and MongoDB, and integrated into AI platforms like LangChain and Groq. Developers use Tavily for everything from customer service chatbots to legal research tools and product search agents. Its biggest strength is in helping AI tools pull live information at the moment it’s needed, not just rely on what they were trained on weeks or months ago.
With this new round of funding, Tavily plans to grow its team and strengthen its technology. It’s hiring across offices in New York and Tel Aviv, and just opened a new location in Abu Dhabi. The team wants to improve how its platform handles search quality, expand its features, and build more tools that make it easier for AI developers to work with real-time data.
Tavily was created specifically for AI agents rather than adapted from existing search engines. Its features, such as smart filters, spam control, and machine-readable formats, are designed for software use. The platform includes full source citations, allowing users to verify where information comes from, which is important in business and legal contexts. While other companies like OpenAI, Exa, Firecrawl, and Perplexity also develop ways for AI to access the web, Tavily focuses on building tools tailored for this purpose.
In a recent blog post, Rotem Weiss, CEO and founder of Tavily, said: “We’re on a mission to onboard the next billion AI agents to the web. Building agentic web infrastructure is uniquely challenging, especially when these agents serve mission-critical applications. That’s why we built an architecture that generates unique economies of scale: a system that becomes smarter and faster the more it is utilized”
Of course, there are challenges. As AI systems scrape and summarize more web content, questions around copyright and fair use are becoming louder. Tavily says it is working to build systems that are both compliant and respectful of publishers. That means following site rules, offering opt-outs, and ensuring that credit always goes back to the source.
The company also faces competition from giants who have more resources and reach but Tavily is betting on precision and purpose. While others build broad platforms, Tavily is focused on becoming the go-to backend for any developer building AI agents that need to search the web live.
The AI agents market is growing rapidly, expected to reach around $7.6 billion in 2025. Looking ahead, Tavily plans to double its headcount, expand partnerships across developer and language model ecosystems, and enhance its real-time search infrastructure. The company aims to support millions of developers worldwide by improving accessibility and performance, highlighting its dedication to enabling AI agents with seamless web connectivity to transform how businesses and consumers interact with technology.
