Aug 20 (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.

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.