Sales Development Representative

Seltz is building the search engine AI agents actually need. Aug 31, 2026 Alex Search built for machines, not humans. Search was built for humans. You type a few keywords, skim a list of blue links, click the one that looks right. AI agents do not work that way, and that mismatch is the entire reason Seltz exists. The San Francisco-based startup is building web search infrastructure specifically for machines. Founder and CEO Antonio Mallia, a former Amazon, Pinecone, and Bloomberg research scientist with a PhD in large-scale web search from NYU, compares the moment to the early 2000s, when Google's PageRank rewrote the rules of search. He thinks that same kind of shift is happening again, this time built for AI agents instead of people. What makes Seltz different. Most AI search products are wrappers. They sit on top of Google, Bing, or Brave's existing APIs and repackage the results. Seltz decided to own the whole thing instead: its own web crawler, its own search index, its own retrieval models, and its own ranking system, all built from scratch. That matters because of how AI agents actually search. A human types one query and reads the top few results. An agent might fire off dozens of long, highly specific queries in the middle of a single task, and it needs clean, structured, citable information back in a fraction of a second to keep reasoning without stalling. Seltz's product, the Web Knowledge API, is built around exactly that: fast, structured answers with sources attached, not a ranked list of links for a human to click through. The team traces its roots to Pisa, Italy, a small city with an outsized concentration of information retrieval researchers going back nearly thirty years. Seltz says it has moved past BM25, the decades-old algorithm most search systems still lean on today, replacing it with a next-generation retrieval model built from research the founders published themselves. Proof in the numbers. Rather than just claim to be fast and accurate, Seltz built a public benchmark, the Dynamic News Search Benchmark, so anyone can compare AI search providers directly. On that benchmark, Seltz reports 89 percent retrieval accuracy at 166 milliseconds, a strong showing in a category where both speed and precision decide whether an agent's reasoning holds up. The company has also been shipping new capabilities at a fast clip. In just the past month, Seltz has: * Launched a Wikipedia search scope for near real-time, event-driven information * Joined Claude's connectors directory, letting Claude search the live web directly through Seltz's index * Introduced the Seltz Answer API, a single endpoint that turns a plain-language question into a grounded, cited answer pulled straight from the web * Rolled out a People scope giving agents access to 800 million professional profiles, refreshed weekly, returned as full text with career history and skills Customers already depending on it. Paris-based recruiting platform Umamy recently switched from Exa to Seltz for candidate research. The reason was depth. Snippet-based search can confirm that a candidate's employer exists, but it cannot tell a recruiter whether that employer is venture-backed, how large it is, or what it actually does, and those are exactly the questions that decide whether a candidate clears a scorecard. Seltz returns full professional profiles and structured company data instead of fragments, which let Umamy resolve the criteria its old setup left open. The two teams went from pilot to production in two weeks. Seltz is stepping into a race that has attracted serious capital across the board. Competitors Parallel, Exa, and Tavily have all raised significant funding of their own, and Tavily was recently acquired for as much as 400 million dollars. Investors clearly believe that retrieval infrastructure, the layer that keeps AI systems fed with fresh, accurate information instead of relying on outdated training data, is becoming one of the most important pieces of the AI stack. Much of the AI boom so far has been about models and chips. This is the next layer getting its turn. The team behind it. The team stayed small on purpose. Seltz runs with 15 people, fully remote, split between the San Francisco Bay Area and research hubs near Pisa and Leipzig, Germany. Backing that lean team is a $12.5 million seed round closed in June 2026, led by Speedinvest and B Capital, with a notably deep bench of angel investors from Google, Amazon, Cohere, Databricks, and Synthesia. Why Seltz is worth watching. Seltz is doing something genuinely different rather than repackaging someone else's index, and it is already proving the approach works with real customers in production, not just a benchmark on a blog post. With a shipping pace that puts out meaningful new features almost every week, this is a team worth checking back in on regularly.

Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at more than $30 billion valuation. The reported equity investment would mark another Nvidia bet on the AI search startup as Perplexity expands its agent-focused business. Prefer on Google Nvidia is reportedly in discussions to invest in Perplexity as part of an equity funding round that could value the AI search startup at more than $30 billion, according to The Information, which cited people familiar with the matter. If completed at that valuation, the round would increase Perplexity's value by more than 50% from its previous financing. Perplexity last raised $200 million at a $20 billion valuation in September 2025. The potential investment would extend Nvidia's existing relationship with the company and further connect the chipmaker with one of the most prominent startups developing AI-powered search and agent technology. Perplexity's rapid valuation growth. Founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity initially raised $73.6 million at a $520 million valuation in January 2024. The company then secured $63 million at a $1.04 billion valuation in March 2024, reaching unicorn status. Its subsequent funding rounds accelerated the increase in valuation. Perplexity raised $500 million at a $9 billion valuation in late 2024, followed by another $500 million round at $14 billion in May 2025. A $100 million extension in July 2025 lifted its valuation to $18 billion, with Nvidia, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, NEA and IVP among the participating investors. The company then raised $200 million at $20 billion in September 2025 and another round at a $23 billion valuation in January 2026. The latest proposed financing would put Perplexity above $30 billion, representing a substantial increase from the roughly $1 billion valuation it reached in early 2024. Nvidia deepens its Perplexity relationship. The potential investment would not be Nvidia's first financial commitment to Perplexity. Nvidia participated in Perplexity's Series B in January 2024, returned for its March 2024 financing and joined the July 2025 extension. According to The Information, Nvidia had also considered a technology licensing arrangement and hiring some Perplexity employees before discussions shifted toward a direct equity investment. Discover more For Nvidia, an investment would provide continued exposure to an AI application that relies heavily on computing infrastructure while giving the chipmaker a closer relationship with a company operating at the intersection of AI search and autonomous agents. AI agents expand the search market. Perplexity's revenue growth has increasingly been linked to Perplexity Computer, its cloud-based AI agent designed to automate multi-step professional tasks. The company's broader strategy reflects a shift in AI search from simply retrieving information for human users toward systems capable of finding information and taking actions on behalf of AI agents and users. Other companies are pursuing similar opportunities. Exa is developing search infrastructure specifically for AI agents rather than traditional human-facing search. Nvidia's NVentures joined Benchmark, Lightspeed and Y Combinator in Exa's $85 million Series B at a $700 million valuation in 2025. Exa later raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in May 2026. Perplexity faces increasing competition. Perplexity is competing against established technology companies with significant distribution advantages, including Google and OpenAI, while also facing newer competitors developing infrastructure specifically for AI agents. Companies such as Exa and You.com are targeting parts of the emerging agent-driven search market that have become increasingly important as AI systems take on more complex tasks. Perplexity's annualised revenue is reportedly around $750 million. At a valuation above $30 billion, that would imply a price-to-sales multiple approaching 40 times, a level that could face greater scrutiny if the company eventually pursues a public listing. CEO Aravind Srinivas has previously discussed the possibility of an IPO within the next few years, making the relationship between Perplexity's private valuation, revenue growth and future public-market expectations increasingly relevant. Whether Perplexity becomes a core search layer for AI agents or remains one of several well-funded companies competing to define the category remains uncertain. The reported Nvidia investment would nevertheless strengthen the startup's position as it continues expanding its AI search and agent business.