AI agent search, agentic web search, and the retrieval layer take center stage as Seltz raises a €12.5M seed to rebuild search for AI agents rather than humans. Founder Antonio Mallia — NYU PhD in information retrieval, ex-Amazon AGI, ex-Pinecone — argues agents fire hundreds of precise queries in parallel and need machine-readable passages in under 200 milliseconds, not ten blue links. We discuss why Seltz takes the harder bet of owning the crawler, index, and retrieval layer instead of orchestrating on top of existing indexes. We unpack the cap table — Speedinvest, B Capital, Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Bain's Future Back Ventures — and what it signals about global ambition with an Italian-founder backbone. We look at a category already minting unicorns: Tavily acquired for up to $400M, Parallel at a ~$2B valuation, Exa at $85M, and ask whether this is the first search era with no winner-takes-all. Then two Italian €3.2M rounds — Compri in AI procurement and Kalipso in regtech — frame the shift from SaaS to "software as labor," where buyers purchase outcomes instead of tools. It's a look at where search, agents, and "boring AI" workflows are heading next.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: [email protected]#venturecapital #italy #startup