Growth Strategist

Spiich raises €3M to build AI agents that never touch the sale itself. September 23, 2026 * Spiich, a Swedish startup that makes sales human, raised € 3 million in its seed funding round in just two weeks, with Ugly Duckling Ventures as the lead investor. * In practice, Spiich's agents locate the companies and messages they want to use, gather background details on the prospects, prepare their follow-up emails, record the results in the CRM, update the sales pipeline, and automatically arrange the next task * The Stockholm-based startup has grown from having two co-founders to an eight-member team within just 10 months. Since he began working on Spiich a year ago, Johan Torssell has spoken to about 2,500 to 3,000 sales representatives and discovered that although they enjoy helping customers, they are less enthusiastic about the other aspects of their jobs. The discrepancy between what salespeople would like to do and the tasks they actually carry out was the reason for Spiich's most recent €3 million seed financing. Ugly Duckling Ventures, based in Copenhagen, led the financing, with Alliance VC and Cherry Ventures joining as new investors. Ampli Ventures, which led the Spiich €600,000 pre-seed round in November 2025, also participated in this round. Spiich's total funds thus amount to €3.6 million. "We received the initial term sheet from Ugly Duckling Ventures after two weeks," Torssell says. Additionally, angel investors from Lovable, Neo4j, Tandem Health, and OpenAI made investments. Johan Torssell, the company's chief executive, and Dennis Hadzialic, the chief technology officer, set up Spiich in Stockholm in June 2025. "We are the system of intelligence and the system of action," says Torssell to Tech Funding News. In practice, Spiich's agents locate the companies and messages they want to use, gather background details on the prospects, prepare their follow-up emails, record the results in the CRM, update the sales pipeline, and automatically arrange the next task. "You must review the message before sending it, but most of the work, typically the kind of tasks that salespeople don't like, is carried out by Spiich," Torssell explains. Market competition. Speaking about competition, Torssell notes, "Our approach is the exact opposite of companies such as 11x or Artisan who are constantly promoting the idea that you shouldn't hire humans but instead hire AI agents for sales." He adds, "We completely disagree with that idea. We know that conversion rates are very poor and that people do not buy from agents. People buy from people." Artisan raised $25 million in its Series A funding in April 2025 as part of its 'Stop Hiring Humans' campaign, while 11x achieved a $350 million valuation following its $50 million Series B round that same year. Still, Torssell identifies Rox and Monaco as Spiich's main competitors, with Rox having launched with $50 million from Sequoia and General Catalyst and Monaco being a platform supported by Benchmark which in May 2026 raised $50 million in its Series B and has so far raised over $85 million, both of the American companies employing the same end-to-end, agent-driven method as Spiich. The rapid growth. Up to February 2026, Spiich consisted only of Torssell and Hadzialic. By summer, the team had increased to four members and now numbers eight, with further hires intended. The company currently provides its services to more than 50 customers in over 15 countries, among them NORNORM, ProfitMetrics, Zaver, Airmee, Rebaba and Epiminds, and has offices in Panama, Colombia, Brazil and the Nordics. Almost all of the company's growth has been due to word of mouth. Torssell has not disclosed the revenue figures, stating that they will be looked at "once we have $100 million ARR", but he does report month-on-month growth of over 100% in early 2026 and a net revenue retention of 160%. Louise Lachmann, a general partner at Ugly Duckling Ventures, who had previously founded Mono Solutions and sold it to Bauer Media Group in 2019, said: "Every sales tool of the last decade promised to give reps their time back, and most of them delivered another system to keep updated. Spiich is the first we've seen that does the non-selling work rather than assisting with it." Going against the market trend. Although the forecasts indicate that the AI SDR market will grow from $5.81 billion in 2026 to $17.58 billion by 2030, Torssell still anticipates a return to more in-person sales. Most of the investments are directed towards the contrary trend, and Spiich's funding occurs in a particularly strong year for AI investment in the Nordic region, which also saw the launch of a €21 million micro fund for early-stage Nordic AI founders. No matter which approach is adopted, both models now benefit from substantial financial support. Spiich relies on the idea that customers still value personal interaction.

What Tavily shipped: August 2026. A #1 search benchmark, Rox cuts account research from a week to seconds, get the Financial Services & Insurance Kit, Tavily's inside the Nebius Builder Program, where Tavily has been and where its team is headed next. Tavily Team Aug 31, 2026 Tavily now ranks #1 on SealQA and SimpleQA. Language models keep getting better at reasoning, which means, the limiting factor has moved from the model to the quality of the information it receives. So, the Tavily team spent the past several months overhauling core parts of its search system, including reranking and evidence-quality modeling; evidence deduplication and contradiction handling; and index coverage and temporal freshness. Now, Tavily ranks #1 on SealQA-Hard, SealQA-0, and SimpleQA Verified. Tavily wrote out why Tavily made these improvements, the evaluation method Tavily used, plus when and how they help your agents. How Rox cut account research from a week to seconds. Rox helps the Global 2,000 automate their entire revenue cycles. But, to make that happen, their agents need to work off of what's happening right now, and need to be trusted to work across thousands of accounts, fast. Multiple providers were tested, but ultimately, Rox chose Tavily based on cost, a good working relationship with the Tavily team, and unmatched results in their own evals. Tavily now handles millions of Rox's search and extraction requests a day, each answered in milliseconds, so a fresh signal lands on a rep's screen in a few seconds. Tavily joins the Nebius Builder Program. The Nebius Builder Program is now live in early preview. Builders who join the program can learn the Nebius, Tavily, and Token Factory stack, and gain access to the Builder community. When you join, you get Tavily and Token Factory credits, office hours with Nebius engineers, and can take the Nebius Academy certification. If you're looking to try a model, explore inference, add web grounding, take part in training, or learn how the Nebius stack works, this free-to-join program is a must. A starter kit for financial AI agents. Choosing the right retrieval layer for agents in investment research, AML, and risk workflows comes with its own challenges in compliance and audits. On top of delivering accurate findings, teams need to know their web search API is built for secure, auditable retrieval. So, its team put together a run through on how to choose the right provider, and built a starter kit for teams in the finance industry. The Financial Services & Insurance Kit includes a quick-start guide and reference architecture to help you get started with building agents for compliance intelligence, investment research, and merchant risk. New integrations: Convex, OpenCode, and NanoClaw. Convex. Add real-time search and content extraction to a Convex app as an isolated Convex component with tavily/convex-tavily. Your app calls a typed TavilyClient; the component keeps your API key in typed Convex environment config, and owns no database tables of its own. Learn more OpenCode. Give your agents reliable web search and extract with the opencode-tavily plugin in OpenCode, the open-source terminal coding agent. Once installed, your agent can run commands directly from the terminal, with all output routed to a .tavily/ directory so it doesn't flood context. Learn more NanoClaw. Your lightweight, persistent NanoClaw agents in Slack, Telegram, and the CLI can now Search and Extract the live web with no API key required using the new tavily integration. You can run /add-tavily-tool in NanoClaw providers that support MCP, like Claude, Codex, and OpenCode, and install it on multiple agent groups. Learn more On the road. The Tavily team was global in August, supporting hackathons; attending, hosting, and co-hosting events. Evan Rimer from its FDE team gave a talk hosted by Stripe Developers on why web search built for humans doesn't hold up for agents: humans optimize for clicks, agents need to optimize for the next decision. Watch the talk Its team also showed up at an IBM event this month, and caught up with builders around Fenway Park and Santa Clara. Where to find Tavily next. * LangChain Interrupt: NYC - September 24, at Halo in NYC's Financial District. Get tickets | * HumanX Amsterdam - September 22-24, at the RAI. Learn more | * The AI Conference - September 29-October 1, at Pier 48, San Francisco. Learn more | * The Summer Lock-In: London - Tavily is a technology partner, alongside OpenAI, Fal, and Pioneer for this hackathon. RSVP | * Builders & Brews & more hackathons - its recurring builder nights keep rotating through SF, Berlin, and London. Drop in, build something, and meet the team, or join a hackathon. Check events -> Loving tavily? Tell the world. Real reviews from real users carry more weight than anything Tavily could say ourselves. If Tavily has made your work easier, two minutes of your time could be exactly what someone else needs to find the right tool. Connect with Tavily. Questions or feedback on any of this? Tavily is on Discord, X, and LinkedIn.