[STRATEGIC] AI Infrastructure · Cloud Computing — February 10, 2026
Nebius Acquires Tavily for Up to $400M,
Betting Big on the Agentic AI Stack
The Yandex spinoff snaps up a one-year-old Israeli search
startup to build what it calls the "complete platform" for autonomous
AI agents — at a price that could reach $400M on milestones.
DEAL SNAPSHOT
|
DEAL VALUE $275M – $400M |
DEAL TYPE Strategic — Platform
Expansion |
|
ANNOUNCED February 10, 2026 |
TARGET FOUNDED 2024 (Israel / US) |
|
STRUCTURE Cash + Milestone
earn-out |
PRIOR FUNDING $25M (Series A, Insight
Partners) |
THE PARTIES
|
ACQUIRER Nebius Group N.V. (Nasdaq:
NBIS) Amsterdam-based
AI cloud company spun out of Yandex in 2024. Provides GPU compute, model
training infrastructure, and its proprietary Token Factory inference service.
Fast-growing footprint across Europe and North America. |
TARGET / SELLER Tavily (AlphaAI
Technologies) Israeli-American
startup founded in 2024. Builds a search API engineered for AI agents —
real-time web retrieval optimized for LLM consumption. 1M+ developer
community, 3M+ monthly SDK downloads. Clients include IBM, Cohere, and Groq. |
DEAL OVERVIEW
In one of the
most telling AI infrastructure deals of early 2026, Nebius agreed to acquire
Tavily — a company barely one year old — for an upfront $275 million in cash,
with the total potentially rising to $400 million depending on performance
milestones. The price reflects the brutal scarcity of real-time grounding
infrastructure for AI agents.
Tavily's core
product is a search API built from the ground up for autonomous agents rather
than human users. Where traditional search returns HTML pages, Tavily returns
structured, filtered, LLM-ready data — a subtle but critical distinction as
enterprises roll out agent-based workflows in finance, logistics, and
operations.
"This acquisition brings the search layer directly into our
stack, so developers can focus on their applications instead of managing
multiple vendors."
— Roman
Chernin, Co-founder & Chief Business Officer, Nebius
STRATEGIC RATIONALE
Nebius frames
this as a vertical integration move. Its Token Factory handles inference (the
reasoning layer), but agents also need live access to the web to avoid
hallucinating on stale training data. By owning Tavily, Nebius bundles
inference + grounding into a single platform — eliminating a key reason
developers stitch together multiple vendors.
The agentic AI
market is projected to grow from ~$7 billion in 2025 to between $140 and $200
billion by the early 2030s. Nebius is positioning itself as the open,
model-agnostic alternative to hyperscaler stacks.
KEY DEAL TERMS
The upfront consideration of $275 million is payable in cash. The additional $125 million is structured as an earn-out tied to performance targets. Tavily's founder Rotem Weiss and the full team will join Nebius, with Tavily continuing to operate under its own brand. Nebius holds the option to settle earn-out payments in cash or in Nebius Class A shares.