Companies across many industries are implementing AI agents for internal use, automating a wide range of tasks. In the financial sector, AI agents play a critical role in fraud detection by analyzing vast amounts of transaction data in real time. Meanwhile, sales organizations leverage AI agents to gather data on potential customers, scouring the web and social media for valuable insights.
To be effective, these agents must access the internet and retrieve information from relevant sources while adhering to company policies and mimicking human research methods. Connecting an AI agent directly to a large language model like ChatGPT without proper safeguards can lead to inappropriate or unreliable results.
George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, emphasized the importance of governance, risk, and compliance in enterprise AI. Without proper controls, the deployment of AI agents could become chaotic. This concern led Insight Partners to lead a $20 million Series A investment in Tavily, a startup that enables AI agents to access the web in a compliant manner. The funding brings Tavily’s total investment to $25 million.
Tavily was founded last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, who initially created an open-source project called GPT Researcher. The project fetched real-time web data before ChatGPT had internet access and quickly gained popularity, amassing nearly 20,000 GitHub stars. After ChatGPT and other large language models introduced web search capabilities, Weiss shifted focus to enterprise clients with Tavily.
Tavily provides tools to companies like Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer, allowing their AI agents to search, crawl, and extract structured insights from public and private sources. While most AI agents still lack internet connectivity, Weiss envisions Tavily enabling the next billion agents to access the web securely.
The startup faces competition from other players in the space. Exa, which raised a $17 million Series A last year, and Firecrawl, a smaller startup offering web search connectivity, are among its rivals. OpenAI and Perplexity also provide search solutions tailored for independent developers.
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