Seltz raises $12.5M to build search engine for AI agents
The startup owns its entire search stack and aims to serve machine queries, not human clicks, as AI transforms information retrieval.
A startup called Seltz has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to build a search engine purpose-built for AI agents rather than human users, entering a competitive field where major AI labs are racing to control their own web retrieval infrastructure.
The round was led by European venture firm Speedinvest and global investor B Capital, with participation from Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures, the venture arm of Bain & Company, according to details first reported by Fortune.
A different kind of search problem
Founder and CEO Antonio Mallia argues that traditional search engines were architected for people typing short keyword queries and skimming ranked links. AI agents operate differently—they fire off long, precise queries, sometimes hundreds in parallel, and need machine-ready information they can cite rather than snippets designed to entice clicks.
"The old search methods don't work because they were architected for humans," Mallia told Fortune. "The information [the AI agent needs] is actually not in the snippet. It's in the body of the web page, it's in things like tables, images, and other forms of representation that can be useful for an LLM or for an agent."
Seltz owns its entire search stack—web crawler, search index, retrieval models, and ranking algorithms. This distinguishes it from many AI search products built atop Google, Bing, or Brave's APIs. The system crawls hundreds of millions of pages daily and returns results in under 200 milliseconds, scoring individual passages and extracting specific tables, text, or images an agent needs.
Why it matters
As AI agents become more capable of autonomous research and task execution, control over search infrastructure becomes strategically critical. Companies relying on third-party search APIs face potential disruption—Google sued SerpApi in December for allegedly circumventing its anti-bot protections, and OpenAI was reportedly among SerpApi's customers. Building independent search capability at scale remains expensive and technically challenging, creating an opening for specialized providers that can serve the unique requirements of machine queries rather than human browsing behavior.
Crowded competitive landscape
Seltz faces well-funded competitors. 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 up to $400 million earlier this year. OpenAI and Perplexity have also reportedly been working to build their own search indexes and web crawlers.
Mallia, whose PhD work at New York University focused on information retrieval, previously worked as an applied scientist on Amazon's artificial general intelligence team and as a research scientist at vector-database company Pinecone. He founded Seltz in October 2025.
The company currently employs 15 people, with only half a dozen full-time, working fully remote across the San Francisco Bay Area and hubs near universities in Pisa, Italy, and Leipzig, Germany. Many team members hold PhDs in information retrieval, and advisers include executives from Google, Ramp, Cohere, Synthesia, and Databricks.
Seltz plans to use the funding to continue developing its search stack, hire additional staff, and launch enterprise sales efforts.
These details were first reported by Fortune.
This is an original analysis by the Omega editorial team. Source reporting: AI Watch.
Want systems like this working for your business?
Book a Call