Keenable Secures $26M to Build AI-First Web Search Index With 100 Billion Documents

Accel-backed Keenable is indexing the web for AI agents

Search engines were built and optimized for people, who can't spare the time or attention required to scan entire webpages. But as people increasingly use AI chatbots to search the web and do tasks, there's a line of thinking that the Internet's current infrastructure needs to be updated to cater to AI instead, as these bots can read and process much larger portions of information. Andrey Styskin, who previously led Russian search giant Yandex's search, AI and cloud division, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri are working to solve that problem with their new startup, Keenable. The company recently came out of stealth $26 million in seed funding. Accel led the funding round, which also saw participation from Conviction Partners and some business angels. From Styskin's perspective, AI chatbots tend to do much better if they can ground their responses with source documents. "This actually creates a new flywheel that is different from what Google learned from human behavior," he told TechCrunch. Keenable says it has been building a web search index of more than 100 billion documents, and its API is already used in production at several AI labs and inference providers during both training and runtime. The startup wouldn't disclose who its customers are, but it recently struck a partnership with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval. Drawing from his experience of 20 years building search at Yandex and Amazon, Styskin explained how Keenable's product is different from enterprise search solutions that can break down and prove very costly at web scale. "If you do not fine-tune your index structures for a specific task, the cost of serving and scanning the whole internet is enormous because of the volume. That's why you need to innovate on how you can narrow the search space based on your query very fast. This is what we are bringing to the table," he said. According to Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the investment, AI players have very few options when it comes to web-scale search infrastructure, especially with Google and Microsoft taking steps to shut down their existing search APIs to avoid cannibalization. Instead, the tech giants are opting for a more bundled approach, and being selective about their partners. To Styskin, these decisions confirmed the opportunity he saw when he was at Amazon, working with Petri on web search infrastructure for AI applications such as Alexa. He'd seen Cloudflare data that AI crawlers were responsible for a growing share of search volume, and started realizing that there was an opportunity to develop web search infrastructure that is built with AI in mind. Armed with that experience, Styskin tapped into his network to hire a handful of former colleagues for his new startup, which is also building proprietary retrieval capabilities. This includes an upcoming product, WebQueryLanguage, which would help AI systems answer questions by combining information from various web sources, even when none contain the full answer. Costs will be an important part of the equation. Styskin says while it is "extremely hard" to convince people to move away from Google for search, the innovators' dilemma means that the U.S. giant is potentially "beatable" on agentic queries, and a smaller company like Keenable can innovate and offer a more cost-efficient solution to AI companies. Still, the costs of building a giant search index are real. "Don't ask -- it is painfully expensive," he said. But, he says the startup is doing its best to keep costs in check and pace itself. With a team of 15 engineering staff across the U.S. and Europe, the company plans to use the fresh cash to double its headcount by the end of the year to build its go-to-market motion. There are many more steps before the startup can achieve its dream of becoming "the next Google for AI agents." Other players have entered the space, such as Brave and Exa; and Google itself is overhauling its search experience for the AI era. But this broader motion indicates that Keenable's conviction is also shared at the Googleplex: whether it's for humans or for agents, the era of the "ten blue links" may be coming to a close.

Agentic web search infrastructure startup Keenable raises $26M

Agentic web search infrastructure startup Keenable raises $26M Artificial intelligence startup Keenable.ai Inc. said today it has exited stealth with $26 million in funding to try and revamp a web search infrastructure that was built for humans, rather than the billions of autonomous agents that many believe will soon dominate the internet. The seed round was backed by investors including Accel, Brightwing Capital, Conviction Partners and scOp Venture Capital, and saw participation from a number of unnamed Google LLC and Amazon.com Inc. executives as angels. Keenable has developed an independent web search index that spans more than 100 billion documents. Through its index, it optimizes search for the type of low-latency, high-frequency queries conducted by AI agents, serving use cases including market mapping, pricing monitoring and lead enrichment. The startup has developed application programming interfaces for each of these use cases that support straightforward, natural language searches as well as cleaned content fetching. It's able to delivery "model-ready inputs" with minimal delay. It's priced at $1 per 1,000 API requests, aimed at "frontier-scale" users, the company said. Keenable also supports point-in-time historical queries, which means models can search the internet as it existed at a specific point in time, instead of accessing it as it exists right now. Keenable's co-founders know a thing or two about how to search the internet. Chief Executive Andrey Styskin (pictured, left) previously worked at Yandex N.V., the Russian-language internet search giant, while Chief Scientist Matthias Petri (right) comes from Amazon AGI, where he was focused on building internet retrieval systems. In an interview with TechCrunch, Styskin explained that Keenable's product is very different from the enterprise-scale search systems currently used by AI models. "If you do not fine-tune your index structures for a specific task, the cost of serving and scanning the whole internet is enormous because of the volume," he said. "That's why you need to innovate on how you can narrow the search space based on your query very fast. This is what we are bringing to the table." Styskin said he first realized the need for a better way to search the web during his own stint at Amazon, where he worked closely with Petri on building the web search infrastructure for AI applications such as Alexa. He quickly concluded that there was an urgent need for a new kind of web infrastructure designed with AI agents in mind. To that end, Keenable is developing both its own proprietary information retrieval system and a new product called Web Query Language, which helps AI systems to answer questions by pulling data from multiple web sources, even when none of them contain all of the information required to piece together the full answer. The startup claims that the quality of its search results is already superior to agentic search rivals such as Tavily, Exa Labs Inc. and Perplexity AI Inc. in terms of its ability to pull up relevant, clean information that's optimized for AI agent consumption. Styskin told TechCrunch that there's a massive opportunity for agentic search infrastructure. Right now, he said, most AI agents are still using traditional search APIs or else they have built their own web crawlers from scratch. Keenable offers a dedicated index that handles all of this, so developers can focus their efforts on developing their agents exclusively, rather than a search stack. Keenable's customers include a handful of AI labs that are already using its APIs in production, but it didn't name any of them. Armed with today's funding, it plans to double its headcount from the 15 employees it has now in order to accelerate its go-to-market strategy.