Nebius to acquire one-year-old Israeli AI startup Tavily in deal worth up to $400 million
The company’s agentic search layer is set to become the cornerstone of Nebius’s bid to build a full AI platform.
Artificial intelligence infrastructure giant Nebius is acquiring Israeli startup Tavily, which has developed a search layer for AI agents. The deal will see Nebius pay an initial $275 million in cash, with the sum potentially rising to up to $400 million should certain milestones be met. Tavily, founded in late 2024, already generates significant revenue. The Israeli startup raised $20 million in a Series A round last August led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global. Alpha Wave, known for investing in high-profile tech firms like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X, Monzo, HiBob, and others, also led Tavily’s previous funding round. The company’s total funding stands at $25 million.
According to Nebius, this acquisition advances its strategy to build a unified platform where vertical AI companies and enterprises can build, tune, and run autonomous agents. By adding Tavily’s agentic search to its existing AI cloud platform, Nebius is expanding the integrated software stack developers need to assemble and operate enterprise-grade agentic systems.
“We extract data in real time and feed it into AI agents,” said Rotem Weiss, founder and CEO of Tavily, in a conversation with Calcalist. “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.”
Tavily was founded by Rotem Weiss (CEO), Assaf Elovic, and Yuval Rozio (in his capacity as Managing Director at Alpha Wave Global, which incubated the company 12 months ago). The company employs around 30 people across offices in New York, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi, and plans to double its workforce by the end of the year.
“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 says its platform has surpassed one million monthly downloads and that the enterprise-grade system already serves a number of Fortune 500 companies, helping financial institutions combat fraud, logistics providers manage operations, and academic organizations advance research. The company also works with leading global AI firms such as Groq and Cohere.
"We're not just an infrastructure-as-a-service company, we're building the complete platform for anyone who wants to build AI products, agents, or services," said Roman Chernin, co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius. "Tavily is solving a critical part of this stack with agentic search and has proven it with strong developer adoption. This acquisition brings the search layer directly into our stack, so developers can focus on their applications instead of managing multiple vendors. Our strategy is clear: provide an open platform that serves everyone from startups to the largest enterprises, giving them the tools to own their AI destiny.”
