Tavily just raised $20M Series A to connect AI agents to the web—safely.
The startup builds tools that help AI agents browse, crawl, and pull data online without breaking company rules. This keeps AI work in line with internal policies, avoiding “the wild, wild west” of unchecked AI behavior.
Insight Partners led the round, bringing Tavily’s total funding to $25M. The company started as a viral open-source project called GPT Researcher in 2023, created by data scientist Rotem Weiss. It grabbed real-time web data before ChatGPT could. 
Now Tavily focuses on enterprise clients like Groq, Cohere, MongoDB, and Writer. They want to onboard the next billion AI agents to the internet with compliant search tools.
George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch
“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”
Tavily faces competition from startups like Exa, which raised $17M last year, and Firecrawl. OpenAI and Perplexity also offer web search layers for independent developers.
The launch comes amid growing use of AI agents in finance, sales, and other industries—where secure, rules-following internet access is critical for tasks like fraud detection and customer data gathering.
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