Agentic infrastructure startup Seltz raises $12.5M to help AI agents search the web for answers
Agentic search startup Seltz Inc. said today it has bagged $12.5 million in seed funding to build a more optimal infrastructure so that artificial intelligence agents can find their way around the web.
The round was led by Speedinvest and B Capital. Also participating were Italian Founders Fund, Future Back Ventures, futurepresent, Arc Investors, Vento Ventures, Mango Capital, 2100 Ventures and United Ventures, plus angel investors from Google LLC, Hugging Face Inc. and Ramp Network Inc.
The startup was founded by Chief Executive Officer Antonio Mallia, who told Fortune that he’s not just trying to build another AI answer engine like Perplexity. Rather, he’s looking lower down the stack, building search infrastructure that’s optimized for AI algorithms that generate long and detailed queries and run them in parallel to surface structured evidence, rather than a list of links.
“The old search methods don’t work because they were architected for humans,” Mallia told Fortune. He explained that the most useful information needed by AI agents often sits beyond where traditional search engines such as Google can reach. For instance, it might be inside the main body of text, or it might be embedded in tables, images, snippets or other page-level material that human-focused search engines cannot easily dig up.
