siliconangle.com
Seltz seeds seed round to build agentic web search infrastructure for AI agents
Tech News••
2 min read
Published by AINave Editorial • Reviewed by Ramit
TL;DRSeltz raises a $12.5 million seed round led by Speedinvest and B Capital to build an in-house, agent-focused web search stack that surfaces structured evidence for AI agents, not just links.
Seltz Inc., an AI agentic search startup, has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to build an in-house web search infrastructure designed for AI agents. The round was led by Speedinvest and B Capital, with participation from Italian Founders Fund, Future Back Ventures, futurepresent, Arc Investors, Vento Ventures, Mango Capital, 2100 Ventures, United Ventures, and angel investors from Google, Hugging Face, and Ramp Network. Founder and CEO Antonio Mallia describes Seltz as building lower down the stack-crawlers, index, retrieval models, and ranking systems optimized for long, detailed queries-so AI agents can surface structured evidence rather than a simple list of links. Seltz claims its Dynamic News Search benchmark shows 89% accuracy with results returned in under 250 milliseconds, though SiliconANGLE notes these figures are not independently verified. The startup says it can crawl hundreds of millions of pages daily and surface exact passages, tables, or images required by an agent, not just URLs. The team is small-about 15 staff-with a PhD-heavy background in information retrieval and prior Amazon AI research experience. Seltz already has a foundational lab under contract and is piloting with several enterprises building agentic workflows. Funding will be used to scale engineering, hiring, and enterprise sales to support an index spanning tens of billions of documents. In a competitive landscape, Seltz faces larger players such as Parallel Web Systems and Exa Labs, which have attracted substantial funding recently, along with Nebius Group’s acquisition of Tavily. Builders evaluating Seltz should weigh self-reported benchmarks against independent verification and note the company’s early stage and limited public documentation.