As enterprises across various industries deploy AI-powered agents to automate internal tasks on a large scale, ensuring these agents can access the internet securely and in compliance with regulations has become a critical challenge. Start-up Tavily, which focuses on solving this issue, has announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Insight Partners.
The company, which was founded just one year ago, has now raised a total of $25 million, primarily providing enterprise AI agents with web search and data extraction services that align with company policies.
In the financial industry, AI agents are widely used for fraud detection, requiring real-time analysis of massive transaction data. Sales organizations use AI agents to collect information about potential customers, searching for related data through the web and social media. These applications require AI agents to safely access the internet, following corporate policies while simulating the work of human researchers.
George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch: "Corporate governance, risk, and compliance are now extremely important; if left unchecked, it could turn into a lawless western frontier." Directly connecting agents to large language models like ChatGPT without enterprise-level security measures could lead to serious inappropriate outcomes.
Tavily was founded last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, initially stemming from his open-source project GPT Researcher developed in 2023. This consumer-facing project was able to access real-time web data before ChatGPT connected to the internet. Weiss told TechCrunch, "It quickly gained popularity and soon received nearly 20,000 GitHub stars."
After ChatGPT and other large language models introduced web search features, Weiss launched Tavily, focusing on enterprise clients. Unlike GPT Researcher, Tavily provides toolkits for companies such as Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer, enabling their AI agents to search, crawl, and extract structured information from public and private sources.
Although most AI agents are not yet connected to the internet, Weiss said Tavily's goal is to help the next billion AI agents access the internet safely.
In this niche market, Tavily faces several competitors. Exa recently secured a $17 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed, NVIDIA, and Y Combinator. Another smaller startup, Firecrawl, also offers network search connection layer services. Additionally, OpenAI and Perplexity provide search solutions to independent developers.
From the perspective of market demand, the need for secure internet access for AI agents is growing rapidly. As AI technology is deeply applied across industries, how to allow AI agents to fully utilize internet resources while ensuring data security and compliance has become an important issue in enterprise digital transformation.
Tavily's successful funding round also reflects investors' confidence in enterprise-level AI infrastructure. With the trend of large-scale deployment of AI agents, companies that provide safe and compliant internet access services are expected to gain more market opportunities.
This round of funding will help Tavily further improve its enterprise-level AI agent web search platform, offering more enterprises safe and reliable intelligent agent internet solutions.