Exclusive: Seltz, a startup rebuilding web search for AI agents, raises $12.5 million in seed funding

The rise of AI has rekindled the long-dormant search wars. Chatbots and AI agents need to surface timely, relevant information about news and all kinds of products and services. AI startup Seltz is among the players lining up to take on Google, betting that AI agents and chatbots demand a new kind of search engine.

Today Seltz announced that it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by the European venture firm Speedinvest and the global investor B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures, the venture arm of Bain & Company.

Seltz founder and CEO Antonio Mallia said traditional search engines were designed for people typing short keyword-based queries and then skimming a list of ranked links. AI agents work differently. They fire off long, precise queries—some “research agents” send dozens or hundreds of queries in parallel—and they need machine-ready information they can cite, not a snippet designed to entice a human to click through.

“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.” 

Mallia has been preparing for this moment for much of his career. His PhD. work in computer science at New York University focused on information retrieval, and he worked as an applied scientist on Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team and as a research scientist at the vector-database company Pinecone before deciding to found Seltz. He told Fortune the current moment reminds him of the early 2000s, when Google’s PageRank upended how search worked. “The revolution is back again,” he said—this time driven by transformer models and the AI workflows that increasingly do the searching themselves.

What sets Seltz apart, Mallia argues, is that it owns the entire search stack—web crawler, search index, retrieval models, and ranking—rather than wrapping someone else’s search engine. Many AI search products are built on top of Google, Bing, or Brave’s APIs. Some AI companies, such as OpenAI and Perplexity, have also reportedly been working to build their own search indexes and use their own web crawlers to scrape information from the web to respond to queries that demand current information. Still, Google is considered to have the best search index because its massive scale, with billions of daily users, enables it to see far more of the web than any rival product.

In December, Google sued SerpApi—a service that scraped Google’s results and counted OpenAI among its reported customers—for allegedly circumventing its anti-bot protections. Anthropic and Mistral, meanwhile, have been reported to lean on Brave’s index to power web search in their chatbots. Mallia points to such arrangements as evidence that even the largest labs have not built genuinely independent web retrieval, leaving room for a purpose-built alternative.

Seltz’s system crawls hundreds of millions of pages a day, and returns results in under 200 milliseconds. Instead of always handing back a full page or a summary, Mallia said, it scores individual passages and extracts the specific table, text, or image an agent actually needs—an exercise in what he calls context engineering.

The startup is entering a crowded field with a number of better-funded competitors. Parallel, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, recently raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation; another AI native search company, Exa,  pulled in $85 million; and another called Tavily was acquired by the AI-cloud company Nebius for up to $400 million earlier this year. But Mallia said he is confident that controlling the entire search stack and building a better product will prove decisive.

Seltz, incorporated in the U.S. and founded last October, is a lean operation: it currently employs just 15 people, only a half dozen of whom are full time employees. The team, which works fully remote, is split between the San Francisco Bay Area and hubs near European universities in Pisa, Italy, and Leipzig, Germany. Mallia said many on the team hold Ph.D.s in information retrieval and he has recruited other veterans of Amazon’s AI efforts. Seltz’s advisers and angel investors include executives from Google, Ramp, Cohere, Synthesia, and Databricks, along with academics from information-retrieval labs at NYU and the University of Glasgow.

Seltz said the funding it has raised will go towards continuing to develop its search stack, hiring, and the start of an enterprise sales effort.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com