Seltz raises $12.5M seed to rebuild web search for AI agents
What's the deal? SeltzDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a startup reinventing web search for AI agents, has raised $12.5 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Speedinvest and B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, United VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Future Back VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the venture arm of Bain & CompanyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Founder and chief executive officer Antonio Mallia argues traditional search was built for humans typing short keywords and skimming links. AI agents work differently, firing off long, precise queries—sometimes hundreds in parallel—and needing machine-ready data they can cite.
Why now? The rise of AI has rekindled the long-dormant search wars, with chatbots and agents racing to surface timely, relevant information.
Mallia compares the moment to the early 2000s, when Google's PageRank upended search. "The revolution is back again," he told Fortune—this time driven by AI workflows that do the searching themselves.
Seltz's system crawls hundreds of millions of pages a day and returns results in under 200 milliseconds. Rather than handing back a full page, it scores individual passages and extracts the specific table, text, or image an agent needs.
What could go wrong? Seltz is entering a crowded field against better-funded rivals.
Parallel, founded by former Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal, raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation in 2026. Exa pulled in $85 million, and TavilyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → was acquired by NebiusDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → for up to $400 million in 2026.
Mallia bets that owning the entire search stack—crawler, index, retrieval models, and ranking—will prove decisive, rather than wrapping someone else's engine. Still, Google is considered to have the best index, since its billions of daily users let it see far more of the web than any rival.
The signal: Seltz's pitch leans on a roster of investors built for cross-border reach, pairing European firm Speedinvest and global investor B Capital with the Italian Founders Fund and United Ventures—a useful bridge for an early-stage company taking on entrenched US search incumbents. With heavily funded rivals like Parallel and Exa raising far larger rounds, the bet is that owning the full search stack, rather than wrapping Google or Brave, justifies starting smaller.
Read more: Fortune
