Seltz Raises $12.5M Seed to Rebuild Web Search for AI Agents

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Seltz, a company rebuilding web search for AI agents, has raised $12.5 million in a Seed round. The startup is incorporated in the United States, with part of its team based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

The round was led by European venture firm Speedinvest and global investor B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures, the venture arm of Bain & Company.

Seltz provides a web retrieval layer for AI agents and large language models, giving those systems access to fresh, citable, low-latency information through an API. Founded last October, it is a lean and fully remote operation of about 15 people, only a half dozen of whom are full-time, split between the San Francisco Bay Area and hubs near European universities in Pisa, Italy, and Leipzig, Germany.

Founder and chief executive Antonio Mallia is an Italian researcher with a PhD in computer science from New York University who previously worked at Amazon, Pinecone, and Bloomberg.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its crawl and indexing capabilities, grow its engineering and research team, and accelerate go-to-market work across frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, and enterprise customers.