Nebius buys Tavily for $275M to bring real-time agentic search into its AI cloud

The race to build useful AI agents is shifting from flashy demos to something far more practical: access to live information. That shift is now driving real money.

Nebius Group NV has agreed to acquire Tavily in a deal valued at $275 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. The acquisition brings real-time web search directly into Nebius’s AI cloud stack, placing search infrastructure alongside compute as a core building block for autonomous AI systems.

Bloomberg first reported the deal, noting that Nebius, which separated from Russian internet giant Yandex in 2024, will bring Tavily founder and CEO Rotem Weiss and his entire team into the company following the close.

“Cloud computing provider Nebius Group NV agreed to acquire Tavily, a maker of software that helps artificial intelligence agents search for up-to-date information needed for tasks like coding and financial trading. Nebius, which split from Russian internet company Yandex in 2024, will pay $275 million for Tavily, according to a person familiar with the transaction who asked not to be identified because the terms are private. As part of the deal, Tavily founder and Chief Executive Officer Rotem Weiss and his team will join Nebius,” Bloomberg reported.

The timing matters. AI agents are moving beyond static prompts and canned datasets. Enterprises now want systems that can fetch fresh information, verify facts, and act on live data in areas such as coding, financial trading, logistics, and operations. Search has quietly become the missing layer.

From Compute to Search: Nebius Acquires Tavily in $275M Agentic AI Push

Nebius says the acquisition fits its push to offer a single platform where developers can build, tune, and deploy autonomous agents without stitching together third-party services. Tavily’s search layer is expected to slot directly into Nebius’s AI cloud, sitting alongside its Token Factory, which handles inference at scale. The pairing aims to cover both reasoning and grounding, two requirements that enterprise buyers increasingly demand.

Roman Chernin, co-founder and chief business officer of Nebius, framed the move in practical terms rather than vision talk.

“We’re not just an infrastructure-as-a-service company — we’re building the complete platform for anyone who wants to build AI products, agents, or services. Tavily is solving a critical part of this stack with agentic search and has proven it with strong developer adoption. This acquisition brings the search layer directly into our stack, so developers can focus on their applications instead of managing multiple vendors. Our strategy is clear: provide an open platform that serves everyone from startups to the largest enterprises, giving them the tools to own their AI destiny.”

Tavily will continue operating under its existing brand, serving current customers while building new features on top of Nebius’s global infrastructure. Weiss will stay on to lead product development.

“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. Joining forces with Nebius, one of the world’s premier deep-tech engineering teams, accelerates our ability to scale globally and enables us to push the boundaries of what’s possible further and faster,” Weiss said.

Tavily enters the deal with clear traction. The company reports more than 3 million monthly SDK downloads, driven largely by developer adoption, and a community of more than one million users. Its customers include Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, as well as AI firms such as Cohere and Groq. The technology already supports production workloads across financial services, logistics, and enterprise operations.

The broader market signals explain the price tag. Agentic AI is projected to grow from roughly $7 billion in 2025 to as much as $200 billion in the early 2030s. Search infrastructure plays a central role in that expansion, with industry forecasts suggesting AI agents could soon generate more internet queries than humans.

For Nebius, the deal marks a clear statement of intent. The company is no longer positioning itself as a pure compute provider. It wants to own more of the software layer that enterprises rely on to run AI agents safely and reliably at scale.

The transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks, subject to standard closing conditions. Financial terms beyond the reported valuation were not disclosed.

Nebius