The startup says AI agents need machine-ready web retrieval rather than traditional ranked links, and plans to use the funding for product development, hiring, and enterprise sales.
Seltz said it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding as it seeks to build a search engine designed for AI agents and chatbots rather than human web users. The round was led by Speedinvest and B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures, Bain & Company’s venture arm. Founder and CEO Antonio Mallia said conventional search was built for short, keyword-based queries and click-oriented snippets, while AI systems issue longer, more precise requests and need information in a form they can directly use and cite. He told Fortune that useful material often sits in the body of a page, including tables, images, and other formats relevant to an LLM (large language model) or agent. Mallia, whose background includes a PhD. in computer science at New York University, work on Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team, and a research scientist role at Pinecone, framed the current shift as a new search inflection point driven by transformer models. He argues Seltz is differentiated by owning its full search stack (core search infrastructure), including the web crawler, index, retrieval models, and ranking, instead of relying on third-party search APIs. That pitch lands in a competitive market where other AI search companies have raised larger sums or pursued exits. Seltz said its system crawls hundreds of millions of pages a day and returns results in under 200 milliseconds, while scoring passages and extracting the exact table, text, or image an AI agent needs through what Mallia calls context engineering. The company said the new funding will support further development of the search stack, hiring, and the start of an enterprise sales push.