Rotem Weiss

Founder & CEO Tavily

Last Reviewed: September 24, 2026

Executive Summary

Rotem Weiss is the founder and CEO of Tavily, which sells an API that lets AI agents search, extract content from and crawl the live web. Tavily returns structured, citable context for a model to consume, not a list of links for a person to read. Weiss co-founded the company in 2024, raised $25 million in its first year, and within about eighteen months of founding sold it to Nebius Group, the Amsterdam-headquartered AI cloud provider. The acquisition completed on February 19, 2026. Tavily still runs under its own brand, and Nebius said at the time that Weiss and his team would stay on to lead it. Part of the consideration is tied to retaining that team, through a holdback and an earnout that depend on continued employment and on revenue milestones running into 2027.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Tavily in 2024 with Assaf Elovic and Yuval Rozio; the company was incubated by Alpha Wave Global.
• Raised a $20 million Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025, bringing total funding to $25 million.
• Built a customer base that, per Nebius, includes Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and AI companies including Cohere and Groq.
• Agreed the sale of Tavily to Nebius Group, announced February 10, 2026 and completed February 19, 2026.
• Tavily’s developer community passed 2.5 million by mid-2026, up from 1 million at the time of the deal, according to Nebius.

Professional Journey

TechCrunch describes Weiss as a data scientist. Tavily grew out of GPT Researcher, an open-source agent that fetched live web data for large language models before ChatGPT could browse the web itself. By Weiss’s account to TechCrunch, the project “went extremely viral”, gathering close to 20,000 GitHub stars. Once the main chat models added their own web search, the team turned to enterprises. Businesses running their own agents needed a search layer that was fast, controllable and compliant with company policy, and that worked across whichever model they happened to use.

Tavily was founded in 2024, with Weiss as CEO alongside co-founders Assaf Elovic and Yuval Rozio. Rozio took part as a Managing Director of Alpha Wave Global, which incubated the company. Its product is a set of endpoints for search, extraction, crawling, site mapping and multi-step research, all designed to be called by software, not browsed by people. In August 2025 Insight Partners led a $20 million Series A with participation from Alpha Wave Global, taking total funding to $25 million. At the time TechCrunch named Groq, Cohere, MongoDB and Writer among its customers. The team was split between New York and Tel Aviv, and an Abu Dhabi office followed.

In February 2026 Nebius Group, the NASDAQ-listed AI cloud company, agreed to buy Tavily, and the deal closed nine days later. Nebius wanted a real-time web retrieval layer to add to its inference platform, so that customers could run reasoning and retrieval in the same place. In a post announcing the deal, Weiss wrote that Tavily would continue to “operate exactly as it does now” day to day. Nebius’s filings show that the terms were built to keep the team in place: part of the consideration is payable only if Tavily’s executives and employees stay, and an earnout of up to $67.3 million depends on annual recurring revenue milestones measured in December 2026 and March 2027. In its first full quarter inside Nebius, Tavily launched keyless pay-per-search for autonomous agents and gained ISO 27001 certification.

Education

No education record was found in any first-party or dated source consulted for this profile.