The search engine wars are back, and this time the customers aren’t humans typing queries into a browser. They’re AI agents, chatbots, and retrieval-augmented generation systems that need structured, real-time data served at machine speed. Seltz, an Italian startup founded in 2025, just raised $12.5M in seed funding to build exactly that.
The round was led by European venture firm Speedinvest and global investor B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, Future Back Ventures (the venture arm of Bain & Company), and 2100 Ventures. For a company with roughly nine employees, that’s a meaningful vote of confidence from a transatlantic investor coalition.
What Seltz is actually building
AI agents don’t browse the web like humans. They need structured data delivered through APIs, not a ranked list of URLs. Seltz is building what it calls a Web Knowledge API, a system with a proprietary crawler and indexing layer designed specifically for machine consumption rather than human browsing.
The company showcased its Web Knowledge API v1 at VivaTech 2026 in June, giving the broader tech community its first proper look at the product. Co-founders Antonio Mallia and Elias Bassani are positioning Seltz as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of AI applications.
