Seltz announced that it raised a $12.5 million seed round to build web search infrastructure for AI agents. The round was led by B Capital and Speedinvest, with participation from Future Present, Italian Founders Fund, Arc Investors, United Ventures, Vento Ventures, Mango Capital, 2100 Ventures, and Future Back Ventures. The round also included angel investors from Google, Ramp, Tako, and Hugging Face.
Seltz is building a search system designed for AI agents rather than traditional human search behavior. The company said agents search differently from people because they often submit longer queries, run many searches in parallel, and require more complete context from the open web.
The company was founded by Antonio Mallia, who previously spent more than a decade working on web search as a researcher and at Amazon. Seltz is focused on owning more of the search stack end-to-end rather than wrapping existing search engines.
Seltz said it plans to use the funding to scale to tens of billions of documents and expand the team needed to bring its search platform to more companies. The company is investing across engineering, sales, and marketing.
On the engineering side, Seltz plans to expand from a limited set of verticals toward the broader open web while supporting on-premises and in-region deployment. On the commercial side, the company plans to build out a team to reach engineers and enterprises building agentic workflows.
Seltz said it shipped a news index within eight months and has demonstrated strong performance on its Dynamic News Search Benchmark. The company said its system answered at 89% accuracy and returned results in under 250 milliseconds.
The platform is designed to return full documents rather than previews, helping agents reduce extra retrieval steps and improve token efficiency. Seltz also said its own index provides different documents than Google-based systems, giving agents broader coverage when multiple search sources are used.
The company also builds specialized indexes for specific categories, allowing each vertical to be tuned to the structure of the information being searched. Seltz supports deployment in a customer’s own infrastructure, private cloud, or required data region, and the company said it is SOC 2 Type II compliant.
Seltz currently has a 15-person team across the U.S. and Europe. The company said most team members hold PhDs or completed postdoctoral work in information retrieval, and several previously worked on Amazon’s search teams.
Seltz began commercial work late last year and has a foundational lab under contract. The company is also running pilots with teams building agentic workflows.
