Seltz Raises $12.5M to Rebuild Web Search for AI Agents
3 min readThe AI boom has reopened a war most people assumed Google had won for good. On June 24, a startup called Seltz announced $12.5 million in seed funding to rebuild web search for AI agents, the software bots that increasingly do the searching instead of us.
Why AI Agents Need a New Kind of Search
Traditional search engines were designed for people typing short keyword queries and skimming a ranked list of blue links. AI agents work nothing like that. They fire off long, precise queries, and so-called research agents can send dozens or even hundreds of them in parallel. What they need is machine-ready information they can cite directly, not a snippet engineered to lure a human into clicking through.
“The old search methods don’t work because they were architected for humans,” Seltz founder and CEO Antonio Mallia told Fortune. The useful information, he argues, often sits in the body of a page, inside tables, images, and other formats built for a language model rather than a casual reader.
Building Search for AI Agents
The round was led by European venture firm Speedinvest and global investor B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Bain and Company’s venture arm. Mallia is well suited to the moment. He earned a PhD in information retrieval at New York University and worked on Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team and at the vector database company Pinecone before founding Seltz last October.
What sets Seltz apart, Mallia says, is that it owns the entire search stack, from web crawler to index to retrieval and ranking, rather than wrapping someone else’s API. Many AI search products are built on top of Google, Bing, or Brave. Seltz instead crawls hundreds of millions of pages a day and returns results in under 200 milliseconds, scoring individual passages to extract the exact table, text, or image an agent needs.
A Crowded, High-Stakes Race
Seltz is entering a field full of better-funded rivals. Parallel, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, recently raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation. Exa pulled in $85 million, and Tavily was acquired by AI cloud company Nebius for as much as $400 million. Even major labs like OpenAI and Perplexity are reportedly building their own indexes, while Anthropic and Mistral have leaned on Brave’s.
The stakes are straightforward. As agents take over more of the searching, whoever controls how they retrieve information could shape what AI systems know and trust. Seltz is betting that owning the full stack will prove decisive.
For now, Seltz stays lean, with just 15 people split across the San Francisco Bay Area and European university hubs in Pisa and Leipzig. The new funding will go toward its search technology, hiring, and a first enterprise sales push. Whether a small team can out-engineer Google is the open question worth watching.