Dutch-based Nebius buys Israeli startup that connects AI agents to the web

Dutch AI cloud and infrastructure provider Nebius has inked an agreement to acquire Israeli startup Tavily, a software developer of search tools designed to help autonomous agents navigate the web.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed but the transaction is estimated to be worth $275 million, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday.

Founded in late 2024, by Rotem Weiss, Assaf Elovic, and Yuval Rozio, Tavily is the developer of a search infrastructure layer designed specifically to connect AI agents to the web. In less than a year since its founding, the startup raised $25 million in capital, led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global.

Amsterdam-based Nebius, formerly known as Yandex, is a data center operator for AI infrastructure that also sells cloud computing capacity as part of its services.

The deal comes as companies are rapidly integrating autonomous assistants into existing software systems, business processes, and workflows. Nebius said the acquisition advances its strategy to build a unified AI cloud platform where AI companies and enterprises can build, tune, and run autonomous agents.

“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 Nebius co-founder and chief business officer Roman Chernin. “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,” Chernin added.

Nebius operates R&D hubs across Europe, North America, and Israel. The Nasdaq-listed firm has inked large contracts with tech titans, including Microsoft and Meta, amid surging demand for high-performance AI computing. The firm also has a partnership with US chip giant Nvidia.

In May last year, the cloud computing provider was selected by the Israel Innovation Authority to build the infrastructure for Israel’s national AI supercomputer, which will provide access to local startups, companies, and researchers for training AI models.

Agentic AI or virtual AI agents act similarly to smart assistants, using reasoning to make real-time decisions and complete complex tasks with minimal human input such as collating and analyzing vast amounts of data, or for fraud detection.

“AI agents need reliable, real-time access to the web, but the web was never built for them,” said Tavily CEO Weiss. “As agents moved from experiments to production systems, teams ran into the same constraints again and again: Search designed for humans, not machines; scrapers that break, block, or leak data; and infrastructure that didn’t scale with real agent workloads.”

Following the closure of the deal, Tavily staff, including Weiss, will join Nebius, but will continue to operate under its current brand.

“Tavily is on a mission to onboard the next billion AI agents to the web,” said Weiss. “Agentic search is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, and we believe the market is poised to grow exponentially as enterprises deploy autonomous AI systems.”

Among Tavily’s customers are Fortune 500 enterprises, including IBM, alongside AI companies such as Cohere and Groq.

The agentic AI market is projected to grow from about $11 billion in 2026 to up to $199 billion by 2034, according to a report by Precedence Research.