Rotem Weiss
Rotem Weiss (Hebrew: רותם ויס; born September 23, 1996) is an Israeli technology entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Tavily, and co-creator of the open-source project GPT Researcher.
Biography
Rotem Weiss was born in Israel in 1996 and lives in New York City. He studied computer science at Columbia University, graduating with a BA in 2024. While at Columbia he co-founded The Bulletin, a virtual bulletin board for students, which placed third in the undergraduate track of Startup Columbia 2024. Before founding Tavily he worked as a data scientist at Talenya, a Paycor company.
In 2023 Weiss co-created GPT Researcher, an open-source autonomous agent that conducts deep web research, which has become one of the most widely used open-source research agents, with about 30,000 stars on GitHub. In January 2024 he released GPT-Newspaper, an open-source agent built on LangGraph and Tavily that generates personalized newspapers. In 2024 he co-taught the DeepLearning.AI short course AI Agents in LangGraph with LangChain founder Harrison Chase.
Weiss founded Tavily in 2024; the company was incubated by Alpha Wave Global. Tavily provides web search, extraction and crawling APIs purpose-built for AI agents and large language models. Tavily raised a $5 million seed round led by Alpha Wave Global in July 2024 and a $20 million Series A co-led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global in August 2025, bringing total funding to $25 million. By early 2026 the company reported more than one million developers and three million monthly SDK downloads, with customers including IBM, Cohere and Groq.
On February 10, 2026, Nebius Group (Nasdaq: NBIS) announced an agreement to acquire Tavily; the acquisition closed on February 19, 2026. Bloomberg reported the price at $275 million, and Calcalist reported a total of up to $400 million including earn-outs. Weiss continues to lead Tavily as founder and CEO within Nebius. Since 2026 he has also been a scout for Andreessen Horowitz. In 2026 Forbes Israel named him to its 30 Under 30 list.
Key facts
- Full name Rotem Ben Weiss (רותם ויס); known professionally as Rotem Weiss · SEC Form 20-F, Exhibit 4.6
- Born September 23, 1996, Israel
- Based in New York City, United States
- Current role Founder and CEO, Tavily (a Nebius company) · Nebius announcement
- Also Scout, Andreessen Horowitz (2026–present)
- Education BA, Computer Science, Columbia University (2024) · Columbia Entrepreneurship
- Tavily founded 2024, New York; incubated by Alpha Wave Global · Calcalist
- Funding $25M total: $5M seed (Alpha Wave Global, 2024); $20M Series A (Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global, Aug 2025) · TechCrunch
- Acquisition Acquired by Nebius Group, announced Feb 10, 2026; reported at $275M, up to $400M with earn-outs · Bloomberg, Calcalist
- Open source Co-creator, GPT Researcher (2023); creator, GPT-Newspaper (2024)
- Teaching Co-instructor, AI Agents in LangGraph, DeepLearning.AI (2024)
- Previous roles Data Scientist, Talenya (2022–2023); Co-founder, The Bulletin (2023–2024)
- Awards Forbes Israel 30 Under 30 (2026) · Forbes Israel
Selected talks, panels and judging
- Rebuilding Search for the Agentic Web — The AI Conference, San Francisco, October 2026
- ICML 2026: Papers That Matter — judge, Agentic AI category, July 2026
- How Tavily Got to 1M Users Without Sending One Cold Email — The Nebius for Startups Podcast, June 2026
- Nebius at ICLR 2026 — Rio de Janeiro, April 2026
- Context engineering and building better agents (AIM345) — AWS re:Invent, December 2025
- The "Internet of AI Agents" is Here — MongoDB People Who Ship, episode 5, November 2025
- AI Agents for Work — industry panel, Columbia University DAPLab, October 2025
- Agent memory and context — panel, Redis Released San Francisco, September 2025
- Harnessing search for agentic AI and context engineering — Elastic webinar, 2025
- Research Agents with Tavily and LangGraph — LangChain AI Agents Meetup, New York, May 2025
- Hackathon judge: MCP × AWS Enterprise Agents, AWS Builder Loft, Langflow @ Cloudflare SF, AI Tinkerers × Google Cloud × Weights & Biases (2024–2025)
- Speaker, Cohere Gen AI Meetup, New York, October 2024
Investing
Weiss is a scout for Andreessen Horowitz and an angel investor in early-stage AI companies, including Euno (2026).
Profiles
Not to be confused with
Other people named Rotem Weiss include a college soccer player at West Texas A&M University, an Israeli attorney, and an Israeli photographer born in 1976. This site is about Rotem Weiss, the founder and CEO of Tavily.