Benchmark has led an $85 million Series B round in Exa Labs at a $700 million valuation, betting that the next wave of AI infrastructure will be purpose-built for agents, not retrofitted from human-centered systems.

This timing reflects a fundamental shift: as AI agents become the primary interface between enterprises and web-scale data, the search infrastructure powering these interactions has become a critical bottleneck. Exa’s neural search architecture delivers sub-450ms latency with zero data retention, addressing the dual enterprise demands of speed and privacy that traditional search engines can’t meet at agent scale.

AI agents process over 1 million queries per month through Tavily’s search infrastructure, yet most agents still can’t reliably access real-time web data. This fundamental bottleneck—agents relying on outdated training data while enterprises demand current information—has created a critical infrastructure gap that Tavily just raised $25 million to solve.

The Series A round, led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global, validates the urgent need for purpose-built web access infrastructure as enterprises deploy AI agents at scale. Unlike generic search APIs that break under agent workloads, Tavily’s platform delivers structured, precise data directly into agent workflows—addressing hallucinations and context gaps that plague current deployments.