Across multiple sectors, companies are rapidly adopting AI agents to automate internal workflows and boost efficiency. In finance, these agents play a vital role in fraud detection by analysing massive streams of transaction data in real time. Meanwhile, sales teams rely on AI agents to gather detailed information on prospects, scanning websites and social media for leads.
For these AI agents to be effective, they must access the internet and source relevant information, all while adhering to strict company policies and mimicking the behaviour of human researchers. However, connecting agents directly to large language models like ChatGPT without proper safeguards risks producing inappropriate or inaccurate results.
“Governance, risk, and compliance at the enterprise level is crucial today,” said George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, in an interview with TechCrunch. “If you let it run unchecked, it becomes the wild, wild west.”
To address this, Insight Partners recently led a $20 million Series A funding round for Tavily, a startup that ensures AI agents can connect to the web while staying compliant with company-specific guidelines. This round brings Tavily’s total funding to $25 million, just one year after its founding.
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Tavily was founded by data scientist Rotem Weiss, who initially gained attention in 2023 with an open source project called GPT Researcher. This early tool allowed users to fetch real-time web data before ChatGPT had internet access, quickly attracting nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub.
Building on that momentum, Weiss launched Tavily to target enterprise customers. Today, Tavily offers a suite of tools that enable companies such as Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer to deploy AI agents capable of searching, crawling, and extracting structured insights from both public and private sources—all within compliance boundaries.
While most AI agents remain offline, Weiss envisions Tavily enabling the next billion AI agents to explore the web safely and effectively.
Tavily is one of several startups in the emerging market for AI agent web connectivity. Competitors include Exa, which raised a $17 million Series A backed by Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator last year, as well as Firecrawl, a smaller player offering similar search layers. Major AI players like OpenAI and Perplexity also provide web search tools targeted primarily at independent developers.
As AI agents become increasingly integrated into business workflows, the race is on to build platforms that balance cutting-edge capabilities with enterprise-grade governance and risk controls.
