Seltz, a nine-person team split between the US and Italy, has launched a search engine built only for AI agents and raised US$12.5m in seed funding led by Speedinvest and B Capital.
Rather than reselling Google, Bing or Brave, Seltz says it rebuilt the whole stack itself in Rust: crawler, index, retrieval models and ranking. It crawls hundreds of millions of pages a day and returns structured, ad-free, citable results in under 200 milliseconds. Founder Antonio Mallia's reasoning is the interesting part. Web search was designed for a human typing a few keywords and skimming ten blue links; a research agent fires dozens or hundreds of precise queries in parallel and needs machine-ready text it can cite, not a snippet built to bait a click.
It is a crowded lane, with better-funded rivals Parallel and Exa chasing the same wager, and owning the full crawl is expensive insurance against the day agents become search's heaviest users.