Tavily raises $25M to power compliant AI agent web access for enterprises

Companies across industries are increasingly deploying AI agents to automate tasks internally, from fraud detection in finance to gathering customer insights in sales. In these applications, AI agents often need to access the internet to find timely, relevant information—whether analyzing transaction patterns or researching potential leads on social media. However, connecting AI agents directly to large language models like ChatGPT without proper controls can lead to serious risks, including data breaches, compliance violations, and inappropriate outputs. “Governance, risk, and compliance at the enterprise is so important now, and if you just let that happen, it’s just going to be the wild, wild west,” said George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, speaking to TechCrunch. To address this challenge, Insight Partners led a $20 million Series A investment in Tavily, a startup building secure, enterprise-grade tools that enable AI agents to access the web responsibly. The round brings Tavily’s total funding to $25 million since its founding just one year ago. Founded by data scientist Rotem Weiss, Tavily began as an open-source project called GPT Researcher in 2023. It was one of the first tools to deliver real-time web data to AI models before ChatGPT gained internet access. The project quickly gained traction, amassing nearly 20,000 GitHub stars in a short time. After the launch of web-connected LLMs, Weiss pivoted to focus on enterprise clients, launching Tavily as a platform designed to help organizations safely integrate web search into their AI workflows. The company provides a suite of tools that allow enterprise AI agents to search, crawl, and extract structured insights from both public and private sources. Tavily’s platform is already used by companies including Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer. Weiss says Tavily’s mission is to onboard the next billion AI agents to the web—while ensuring they operate within company policies and security standards. Tavily is not alone in this space. It competes with Exa, which raised $17 million in a Series A from Lightspeed, Nvidia, and Y Combinator last year. Another player, Firecrawl, offers a similar web search connectivity layer. Meanwhile, major AI players like OpenAI and Perplexity also provide search solutions, primarily aimed at independent developers and startups. But Tavily’s focus on enterprise governance and compliance gives it a distinct edge in the growing market for secure AI agent infrastructure.