AI Startup Seltz Raises $12.5 Million Seed Funding for Search Stack

Seltz announced it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Speedinvest and B Capital, with participation from Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures. Fortune reported that the company is developing a search engine designed specifically for AI agents and chatbots.

Traditional search engines were built for short keyword queries and ranked links, founder and CEO Antonio Mallia said. AI agents instead issue long, precise queries and require machine-readable data from page bodies, tables, and images. Mallia holds a PhD in computer science from New York University focused on information retrieval.

He previously worked as an applied scientist on Amazon’s artificial general intelligence team and as a research scientist at Pinecone. He compared the current shift to the early 2000s when Google’s PageRank changed search. Seltz owns its entire search stack, including web crawler, index, retrieval models, and ranking.

The system crawls hundreds of millions of pages daily and returns results in under 200 milliseconds. It scores passages and extracts specific tables, text, or images rather than full pages. The company was incorporated in the U.S.

And founded last October. It employs 15 people, six of them full time, with the remote team split between the San Francisco Bay Area, Pisa, Italy, and Leipzig, Germany. Advisers and angel investors include executives from Google, Ramp, Cohere, Synthesia, and Databricks, plus academics from NYU and the University of Glasgow.

Seltz said the funding will support further development of its search stack, hiring, and the start of an enterprise sales effort.