Nebius Group’s transformation from pure infrastructure provider to full-stack AI cloud platform took a big step Tuesday when it announced an agreement to acquire Israeli search startup Tavily.
The value of the deal, part of Nebius’ push to dominate the market for agentic artificial intelligence (AI), is expected to start at $275 million, and rise as high as $400 million if specific financial performance milestones are met.
The acquisition is expected to close in the coming weeks.
The acquisition addresses a fundamental bottleneck in the development of autonomous AI, the hallucination problem caused by stale data. While Nebius currently provides high-performance inference through its Token Factory, giving agents the brainpower to reason, Tavily provides the “eyes” to see the live web.
Tavily’s agentic search infrastructure allows AI agents to conduct real-time research, verify facts, and navigate the internet autonomously. By integrating this directly into the Nebius platform, developers can now build enterprise-grade agents without the friction of stitching together disparate vendors for reasoning and search.
“We’re not just an infrastructure-as-a-service company,” Roman Chernin, co-founder and chief business officer of Nebius, said in a statement. “This acquisition brings the search layer directly into our stack, so developers can focus on their applications instead of managing multiple vendors.”
The timing of the deal reflects an explosive shift in how the internet is used. Market researchers forecast the agentic AI market could balloon from $7 billion in 2025 to as much as $200 billion by the early 2030s. Experts predict that within a few years, AI agents will generate more internet search queries than human beings.
Tavily boasts more than over one million users and three million monthly SDK downloads. Its current client roster includes industry heavyweights IBM Corp., Cohere, and Groq.
Tavily’s roughly 30-person team, led by founder and CEO Rotem Weiss, will join Nebius while maintaining the Tavily brand for existing customers. Weiss noted that joining Nebius’s deep-tech engineering team will “accelerate our ability to scale globally” as enterprises move toward deploying autonomous systems at scale.
“Tavily is on a mission to onboard the next billion AI agents to the web. Agentic search is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, and we believe the market is poised to grow exponentially as enterprises deploy autonomous AI systems,” Weiss said in a statement.
