{"id":2113,"date":"2026-06-24T11:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2026-06-24T11:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:09:07","slug":"exclusive-seltz-a-startup-rebuilding-web-search-for-ai-agents-raises-12-5-million-in-seed-funding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2113","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Seltz, a startup rebuilding web search for AI agents, raises $12.5 million in seed funding"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

Read more Worker engagement just hit a decade low \u2014 and new data from 88 million employees shows why managers are the problem<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2014some \u201cresearch agents\u201d send dozens or hundreds of queries in parallel\u2014and they need machine-ready information they can cite, not a snippet designed to entice a human to click through.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe old search methods don\u2019t work because they were architected for humans,\u201d Mallia told Fortune. <\/em>\u201cThe information [the AI agent needs] is actually not in the snippet. It\u2019s in the body of the web page, it\u2019s in things like tables, images, and other forms of representation that can be useful for an LLM or for an agent.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s artificial general intelligence team and as a research scientist at the vector-database company Pinecone before deciding to found Seltz. He told Fortune <\/em>the current moment reminds him of the early 2000s, when Google\u2019s PageRank upended how search worked. \u201cThe revolution is back again,\u201d he said\u2014this time driven by transformer models and the AI workflows that increasingly do the searching themselves.<\/p>\n

What sets Seltz apart, Mallia argues, is that it owns the entire search stack\u2014web crawler, search index, retrieval models, and ranking\u2014rather than wrapping someone else\u2019s search engine. Many AI search products are built on top of Google, Bing, or Brave\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In December, Google sued SerpApi\u2014a service that scraped Google\u2019s results and counted OpenAI among its reported customers\u2014for allegedly circumventing its anti-bot protections. Anthropic and Mistral, meanwhile, have been reported to lean on Brave\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Read more The hidden cost of your AI rollout: burning out the high performers running it<\/a><\/p>\n

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Seltz\u2019s 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\u2014an exercise in what he calls context engineering.<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s AI efforts. Seltz\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Read more Amazon Prime Day isn\u2019t a midsummer shopping event anymore. Here\u2019s what changed in 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

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Speedinvest and Capital B led the funding round for Seltz, a web search startup founded by a veteran of Amazon and Pinecone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-venture-capital"],"yoast_head":"\nExclusive: Seltz, a startup rebuilding web search for AI agents, raises $12.5 million in seed funding - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2113\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Exclusive: Seltz, a startup rebuilding web search for AI agents, raises $12.5 million in seed funding - 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