Companies in many industries apply AI agents for internal use, automating a wide range of work.
In the financial sector, AI agents are critical to detecting fraud. They can analyze huge amounts of transaction data in real time. Meanwhile, sales organizations use AI agents to gather data on potential customers. These AI sales agents can clean up the web and social media for information.
To be effective, these agents must have access to the internet and find information from relevant sources, all by following the company’s policies and reflect the way the human researcher operates.
Connecting an agent directly to a large language model such as ChatGPT without special securities of the company can lead to extremely inappropriate results.
“Governance, danger and compliance with the business are so important now and if you let this happen, it will just be the wild, wild west,” said George Mathew, chief executive of Insight Partners, at TechCrunch.
That is why the Insight partners have led a series of $ 20 million to Tavily, a start -up that connects AI agents to the web in a way that complies with the company’s specific policies. The investment brings Tavily’s total funding of Tavily to $ 25 million.
Founded last year by Rotem Weiss Data Scientist, Tavily started as an open source project that created in 2023 called GPT Researcher. The project focused on consumers has brought in real -time web data before Chatgpt connects to the internet, Weiss told TechCrunch. “He went extremely viral. So quickly we won nearly 20,000 stars Github.”
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Weiss started Tavily after chatgpt and other LLMs that introduced the web search. Unlike the GPT researcher, Tavily focuses on business customers. It provides a series of tools to companies such as Groq, Cohere, Mongodb and the author, allowing their agents to search, detect and extract structured knowledge from both public and private sources.
While most AI agents are not yet connected to the internet, Weiss says Tavily’s goal is to board the next billions of agents on the web.
Tavily is not the only startup that provides search tools for AI agents. It competes with EXA, which has set a series of $ 17 million from Lightspeed, Nvidia and YC last year. Another smaller boot that offers a web search connectivity layer is Firecrawl. Openai and Purplexity also offer search solutions oriented to independent developers.
