Nebius to acquire AI agent search startup Tavily for $275M upfront

Nebius agreed on February 10 to buy Tavily, an Israeli startup that supplies real-time web search and extraction to AI agents, for $275M in cash, with earnouts that could bring the total to $400M. Tavily was founded in late 2024 by Rotem Weiss, Assaf Elovic and Yuval Rozio of Alpha Wave Global, which incubated it. It raised $25M in total, including a $20M Series A led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global. The company says more than 700,000 users rely on its tools and that it serves Fortune 500 customers. It had about 30 employees across New York, Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. Nebius plans to add Tavily's search layer to its AI cloud so customers can build and run agents on one stack. GPU clouds are buying up the software around inference to avoid competing on price alone. Agent tooling startups with heavy developer adoption are now acquisition targets for infrastructure providers, sometimes within a year of founding.