AI agent startup TinyFish raises $47 million in ICONIQ-led round
(Reuters) -AI startup TinyFish has raised $47 million in a Series A funding round led by ICONIQ Capital to scale its platform for building and deploying AI-powered web agents, the company told Reuters.
The round included participation from USVP, MongoDB Ventures and Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The company plans to use the capital to invest in products and expand its go-to-market operations.
Founded in 2024, TinyFish is building web-based agents to automate repetitive and complex online tasks for enterprises. Its technology simulates human-like browsing to perform actions and gather data at a massive scale.
The company is initially focusing on the retail and travel sectors. Its primary use cases include dynamic price surveillance, where AI bots track prices, promotions, shipping times, and inventory levels across competitor websites in real-time.
These tasks were traditionally handled by large, offshore teams performing manual data entry or by custom software scripts that would often break when a website's design changed.
Palo Alto, California-based TinyFish has a team of about 25 people. The new funding provides TinyFish with a runway of three to four years, according to CEO Sudheesh Nair.
The AI agent space is experiencing a gold rush, with a flurry of offerings onautonomous software. Big tech companies and startups are racing to capitalize on the shift from static large language models (LLMs) to dynamic agents capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks.
TinyFish says its technology could help solve the problem of efficiently and reliably gathering critical data from the dynamic and messy environment of the internet.
"If you can turn the internet into analyzable data, it will fundamentally give businesses advantages that others don't have," Nair told Reuters, adding that the goal is to help businesses "make more money," not just save on costs.
Its system uses advanced AI models for reasoning and exploration, and then codifies that knowledge for high-speed, deterministic execution at scale, according to Nair.
Amit Agarwal, partner at ICONIQ, said the decision to invest was driven by TinyFish's success with early pilot customers, including tech giant Google.
"They had operationalized it, productionized it at a very large scale for two large-scale customers who have all the development resources in-house to build these types of things themselves," Agarwal said.
(Reporting by Krystal Hu; Editing by Stephen Coates)
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
6 hours ago
- The Star
Disney's new ESPN app reaches for sports fans outside cable TV
FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed Disney logo is seen in front of the ESPN logo in this illustration created on July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo LOS ANGELES -Walt Disney's ESPN will deliver its full range of sports programming outside of pay TV for the first time starting on Thursday, when the network debuts an app designed to be a hub for live games and personalized news, stats and highlights. The ESPN app is Disney's effort to capture some of the tens of millions of customers that the pioneering sports channel has lost since 2010 during the streaming TV revolution. ESPN executives said they have tailored the new offering, which is far broader than the limited ESPN+ app launched in 2018, to cater to the tastes of today's sports fans. "We know that fans don't just want to watch," ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro told reporters. "They want an experience. They want to interact." The app will offer more than 47,000 live events each year from the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, college football, tennis, golf and other sports. It will cost $30 per month. An introductory offer will include ad-supported versions of the Disney+ and Hulu streaming services for free. Fans can enter their favorite teams and sports for customization such as a personalized version of the "SportsCenter" news and recap show. Artificial intelligence will generate narration based on the voices of ESPN anchors. A new feature called "Verts," or scroll-ready, vertical video highlights, also can be tailored. Stats for a user's fantasy players will be displayed next to live games. And an ESPN Bet tab will show live, settled and upcoming bets for users who have linked their betting accounts. Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger has called the app "a sports fan's dream." Industry analysts see it as a chance for the company to pick up fans who do not subscribe to cable, and they do not expect it will pull masses from pay TV. ESPN was available in 100 million homes through pay TV in 2010. In July of this year, that number stood at about 61 million. "It's another step in Disney's pivot to (streaming) and the importance to streaming to the overall company," said MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman. ESPN will promote the app extensively. Actor John Cena will star in commercials that stress "All of ESPN. All in One Place." Pay television will "remain a big part" of ESPN's business, Pitaro said. For the quarter that ended in June, ESPN accounted for $1 billion of Disney's $4.6 billion in operating income, or nearly 22%. Most of ESPN's revenue came from fees paid by cable and satellite distributors and from advertising. Subscribers to pay TV will have access to the new ESPN app. Pitaro said the company hoped to drive all of its customers to the app "because that's by far the best, the most holistic experience." (Reporting by Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
The Star
6 hours ago
- The Star
U.S. Senator Sanders favors Trump plan to take stake in Intel, others
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) listens as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer testifies before a Senate Finance Committee hearing on U.S. President Donald Trump's trade policy, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 8, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt/File Photo WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Liberal U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday threw his support behind President Donald Trump's plan to convert U.S. grants to chipmakers, including $10.9 billion for Intel, into government stakes in the companies. "If microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment," Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, said in a statement to Reuters. The awards were part of the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which sought to lure chip production away from Asia and boost American domestic semiconductor output with $39 billion in subsidies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is looking into the government taking equity stakes in Intel and other chipmakers in exchange for the grants, sources told Reuters on Tuesday. Much of the funding for companies such as Micron , Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung has not been dispersed. (Reporting by Alexandra Alper)
The Star
7 hours ago
- The Star
Prosus says quarterly profit rises 54%, plans $2 billion in asset sales
Prosus' logo is pictured on a smartphone in this illustration taken, December 4, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Dutch technology investor Prosus plans to raise $2 billion through asset sales in the near term, the company's CEO said on Wednesday as he announced a 54% increase in quarterly earnings. Amsterdam-headquartered Prosus, which is majority-owned by South Africa's Naspers and focused on food and lifestyle-ecommerce within its key markets of Latin America, India and Europe, has already raised $780 million from asset sales in the last four months to July. In a shareholder letter covering the annual general meeting and sent to media, Chief Executive Fabricio Bloisi said asset sales to date showed "our commitment to disciplined capital allocation" and set $2 billion as a near-term target. Bloisi also said the company's ecommerce adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (aEBITDA) rose 54% to $237 million in the quarter ending June 30, at the top end of the group's guidance. Revenue rose 15% year-on-year to $1.7 billion, he said. (Reporting by Nqobile Dludla;Editing by Helen Popper)
