Tavily

From an open-source project to a company sold in under two and a half years

Assaf Elovic created GPT Researcher back in 2023. It is an open-source tool that lets an AI agent research a topic on the web and produce a report from it. The project gathered about 20,000 stars on GitHub, but Elovic saw that the real market need was broader: not an end-user tool for consumers, but infrastructure that any company building AI agents could use. He teamed up with Rotem Weiss, a data scientist and Columbia graduate, and together they founded Tavily in late 2023, a commercial, enterprise-focused version of the same idea. The road from a side project to a company acquired for about $275 million took less than two and a half years, a pace that shows how fast the AI agent field matured between 2023 and 2026. Calcalist also lists Yuval Rozio, a manager at the Alpha Wave fund that ran the company's incubator, among its founders. This entry does not decide whether that description refers to an operational founder or to his role on behalf of the fund.

Why a regular search engine doesn't suit an AI agent

Classic search engines are built to return ten blue links that a person will read, compare and judge for themselves. An AI agent works differently. It needs a structured answer that it can feed straight into its reasoning process, with no intermediate step of human reading, and without wasting its limited context window on irrelevant text. Tavily built an API that returns results that are filtered, ranked and formatted specifically for these needs. It also supports searching the customer's private sources alongside the open web, a key capability in RAG processes, where a language model must base its answer on real documents and not only on what it learned in training. Customers that adopted this approach include AI infrastructure companies such as Cohere and Groq, as well as large enterprise customers such as IBM.

One funding round, then a quick acquisition

Tavily raised a relatively modest amount before the acquisition: about $25 million in total, including a $20 million Series A in August 2025 led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global. The latter fund was not a chance investor. Alpha Wave launched the company in an incubation program about a year before the Series A, which explains its involvement in the round itself. The relatively modest funding, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by competitors in the AI agent field, did not stop the company from reaching a quick sale. This is a sign that in this market, growth rate and the number of enterprise customers matter to potential buyers at least as much as the size of the funding.

$275 million, up to $400 million with conditions

On 10 February 2026, Nebius, a provider of cloud infrastructure for AI, announced an agreement to acquire Tavily. According to Nebius's official announcement and a Bloomberg report, the deal was worth $275 million, with a mechanism for additional payments tied to meeting performance targets that could raise the total to as much as $400 million. The difference between the two numbers matters: $275 million is the agreed base amount, while $400 million is a performance-dependent ceiling that will not necessarily be reached in full. In May 2026, in its first-quarter results announcement, Nebius listed Tavily among its completed acquisitions. Rotem Weiss and the team joined Nebius as part of the deal and continue to lead the product inside the larger platform.

Why a cloud company buys a search tool

The acquisition fits a strategy Nebius has stated: to build a single cloud platform where developers can build, fine-tune and run autonomous AI agents end to end, without assembling a stack of tools from different sources themselves. Real-time search is a component that almost every serious AI agent needs. Without it, the model is limited to what it learned in training, which may be out of date. For Nebius, buying a company with existing customers and a mature product was faster than building a similar capability from scratch inside its platform.

A note on the geographic rule

Unlike companies such as Wiz, whose development center is entirely in Israel despite being incorporated abroad, Tavily's workforce is in practice split roughly evenly between New York and Israel, with an additional office in Abu Dhabi. The company is counted here as Israeli because it was founded by Israelis, and because that is how the Israeli business press treated it. But the difference from the Wiz case is worth noting: here there is no exclusive development center in Israel, but rather a significant presence and an almost even split between two locations.