\n<\/p>\n
Companies across many industries are implementing AI agents for internal use, automating a wide range of tasks.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Connecting an agent directly to a large language model like ChatGPT without company-specific safeguards can lead to highly inappropriate results.<\/p>\n
\u201cGovernance, risk and compliance at the enterprise is so important now, and if you just let that happen, it\u2019s just going to be the wild, wild west,\u201d George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Insight Partners led a $20 million Series A in Tavily, a startup that connects AI agents to the web in a way that\u2019s compliant with company-specific policies. The investment brings the one-year-old Tavily\u2019s total funding to $25 million.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt went extremely viral, so pretty fast we gained almost 20,000 GitHub stars.\u201d<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n While most AI agents aren\u2019t yet connected to the internet, Weiss says Tavily\u2019s goal is to onboard the next billion agents to the web.<\/p>\n Tavily is not the only startup providing search tools for AI agents. It competes with Exa<\/a>, which raised a $17 million Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and YC last year. Another smaller startup that offers a web search connectivity layer is Firecrawl<\/a>. \u00a0OpenAI and Perplexity are also offering search solutions that are geared towards independent developers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n