The Italian startup is betting that AI agents need their own kind of search infrastructure, not a retooled version of what humans use
The search engine wars are back, and this time the customers aren’t humans typing queries into a browser. They’re AI agents, chatbots, and retrieval-augmented generation systems that need structured, real-time data served at machine speed. Seltz, an Italian startup founded in 2025, just raised $12.5M in seed funding to build exactly that.
The round was led by European venture firm Speedinvest and global investor B Capital, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, Future Back Ventures (the venture arm of Bain & Company), and 2100 Ventures. For a company with roughly nine employees, that’s a meaningful vote of confidence from a transatlantic investor coalition.
What Seltz is actually building #
AI agents don’t browse the web like humans. They need structured data delivered through APIs, not a ranked list of URLs. Seltz is building what it calls a Web Knowledge API, a system with a proprietary crawler and indexing layer designed specifically for machine consumption rather than human browsing.
The company showcased its Web Knowledge API v1 at VivaTech 2026 in June, giving the broader tech community its first proper look at the product. Co-founders Antonio Mallia and Elias Bassani are positioning Seltz as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of AI applications.
The new search wars #
What makes Seltz’s approach distinct is its explicit focus on the API layer. Rather than building a consumer-facing search product, the company is targeting developers and enterprises that are building AI applications and need a reliable, structured knowledge source to plug into their systems.
Why this matters beyond AI #
For crypto and Web3 observers, Seltz itself doesn’t have a token or any blockchain component. But the broader trend it represents is worth paying attention to. The risk, of course, is that Google and other incumbents simply build equivalent capabilities and bundle them into existing products. Google already has massive crawling infrastructure and has been aggressively integrating AI into its search experience. A nine-person startup in Italy competing against that kind of resource advantage needs to move fast and build something genuinely differentiated.
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