The rise of AI has rekindled the long-dormant search wars. Chatbots and AI agents need to surface timely, relevant information about news and all kinds of products and services. AI startup Seltz is among the players lining up to take on Google, betting that AI agents and chatbots demand a new kind of search engine.
Today Seltz announced that it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by the European venture firm Speedinvest and the global investor B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures, the venture arm of Bain & Company.
Seltz founder and CEO Antonio Mallia said traditional search engines were designed for people typing short keyword-based queries and then skimming a list of ranked links. AI agents work differently. They fire off long, precise queries—some “research agents” send dozens or hundreds of queries in parallel—and they need machine-ready information they can cite, not a snippet designed to entice a human to click through.
“The old search methods don’t work because they were architected for humans,” Mallia told Fortune. “The information [the AI agent needs] is actually not in the snippet. It’s in the body of the web page, it’s in things like tables, images, and other forms of representation that can be useful for an LLM or for an agent.”
