Nebius, a major company in artificial intelligence infrastructure, is buying the Israeli startup Tavily, which has built a search tool for AI agents. Nebius will pay $275 million in cash at first, and the deal value could go up to $400 million if certain targets are achieved.
Tavily was founded in late 2024 and is already making strong revenue. The startup raised $20 million in a Series A funding round last August, led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global. With earlier funding also led by Alpha Wave, Tavily has raised a total of $25 million so far.
Nebius says this acquisition supports its plan to create one complete platform where AI companies and large businesses can build, customize, and run autonomous AI agents.
By adding Tavily’s AI search technology to its existing AI cloud platform, Nebius is making it easier for developers to build and manage powerful, enterprise-level AI systems in one place.
“We extract data in real time and feed it into AI agents,” said Rotem Weiss, founder and CEO of Tavily. “The agent receives tools that enable it to retrieve high-level information, filter it, and prioritize what matters.”
According to Weiss, Tavily works with multiple model providers, including Groq. “Companies are looking for a unified search layer that can operate across a wide range of models. More than 700,000 users rely on our agents. If every organization had to build its own search capability, the burden would be enormous. We were born into the world of agents, unlike traditional search companies, our approach is not structured data retrieval but dynamic information extraction.”
“We started with an open-source agent that evolved into the current product,” Weiss said. “Through the Alpha Wave fund we established an office in Abu Dhabi, which is still in its early stages and will focus mainly on development. We expect to employ about 15 people there, with the rest split between Tel Aviv and New York. Many of us are graduates of Columbia University, and the Israeli branch was built within a few months. Roughly half of our employees are based in Israel and half in New York.”
Tavily was founded by Rotem Weiss, the CEO, along with Assaf Elovic and Yuval Rozio, who is also a Managing Director at Alpha Wave Global, the firm that helped launch the company about a year ago.
The company currently has around 30 employees working from offices in New York, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi, and it plans to double its team size by the end of the year.
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