Seltz Inc. raises $12.5M in Seed

Seltz Inc., a startup focused on creating agentic search infrastructure optimized for artificial intelligence, has raised $12.5 million in a seed funding round. The capital injection was led by Speedinvest with participation from B Capital, Italian Founders Fund, Future Back Ventures, and others, including Google and Hugging Face Inc. angel investors. This funding aims to support Seltz's objective of developing a search platform that accommodates AI algorithms capable of handling long, complex queries to retrieve structured evidence rather than generating traditional lists of links.

Antonio Mallia, Seltz's CEO and founder, distinguishes the company’s efforts from conventional search engines. While dominant search players like Google are designed for human interaction, Seltz focuses on the needs of AI systems seeking data buried within text, tables, or images—areas difficult for standard engines to access efficiently. The company's platform eschews traditional search engine infrastructure, building its stack to encompass everything from crawlers to retrieval models, thus positioning Seltz to potentially index tens of billions of documents, a task Mallia acknowledges as capital-intensive.

Mallia’s academic background in information retrieval and his experience at entities such as Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team and Pinecone Systems Inc. underscores his vision for Seltz. His work on the Alexa question answering engine at Amazon highlighted the shift in search consumption from humans to machines, inspiring Seltz's creation. The company reports its facility in crawling hundreds of millions of web pages daily and delivering search outcomes with high speed and accuracy, though these assessments originate internally and are yet to receive independent verification.

Despite Seltz’s progress, the agentic search landscape remains competitive and capital-intensive. Competitors like Parallel Web Systems Inc. and Exa Labs Inc. have secured significantly larger funding rounds, which could provide an edge in scaling capabilities. In April, Parallel Web Systems’ Series B round valued the company at $2 billion, highlighting the high stakes in this space. Moreover, established firms like Nebius Group N.V. are expanding their portfolios with acquisitions such as Israeli startup Tavily Inc., emphasizing the market's dynamism.

As Seltz scales its workforce beyond its current 15 employees, the startup must navigate a landscape populated by better-funded entities. Moving forward, its ability to innovate and efficiently scale will be crucial as it seeks to tap into the burgeoning demand for intelligent search infrastructure. The effective deployment of its recent capital raise will be vital in advancing its technology and proving its capability to extract meaningful insights for AI systems.