Companies across many industries are implementing AI agents for internal use, automating a wide range of tasks.
In the financial sector, AI agents are critical for fraud detection. They can analyze vast amounts of transaction data in real time. Meanwhile, sales organizations are using AI agents to gather data on potential customers. These AI sales agents can scour the web and social media for information.
To be effective, these agents need to access the internet and find information from relevant sources, all while following company policies and mirroring how a human researcher would work.
Connecting an agent directly to a large language model like ChatGPT without company-specific safeguards can lead to highly inappropriate results.
“Governance, risk, and compliance at the enterprise is so important now, and if you just let that happen, it’s just going to be the wild, wild west,” George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch.
That’s why Insight Partners led a $20 million Series A in Tavily, a startup that connects AI agents to the web in a way that’s compliant with company-specific policies. The investment brings the 1-year-old Tavily’s total funding to $25 million.
Founded last year by data scientist Rotem Weiss, Tavily began as an open source project he created in 2023 called GPT Researcher. The consumer-focused project fetched real-time web data before ChatGPT was hooked up to the internet, Weiss told TechCrunch. “It went extremely viral, so pretty fast we gained almost 20,000 GitHub stars.”
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Weiss launched Tavily after ChatGPT and other LLMs introduced web search. Unlike GPT Researcher, Tavily focuses on enterprise clients. It provides a suite of tools to companies like Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer, allowing their agents to search, crawl, and extract structured insights from both public and private sources.
While most AI agents aren’t yet connected to the internet, Weiss says Tavily’s goal is to onboard the next billion agents to the web.
Tavily is not the only startup providing search tools for AI agents. It competes with Exa, which raised a $17 million Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator last year. Another smaller startup that offers a web search connectivity layer is Firecrawl. OpenAI and Perplexity are also offering search solutions that are geared toward independent developers.