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 on autonomous 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.