Accel-backed Keenable is indexing the web for AI agents
techcrunch ·
Keenable, a startup founded by former Yandex and Amazon search executive Andrey Styskin and AI scientist Matthias Petri, emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company is building a web search index of over 100 billion documents and offers an API already used in production by AI labs and inference providers for training and runtime tasks. Keenable recently partnered with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval, though it has not disclosed its other customers. Styskin argues that AI chatbots perform better when grounded in source documents, creating a new search flywheel distinct from traditional human-focused search. He emphasizes that web-scale indexing requires innovative techniques to quickly narrow the search space and control enormous serving costs. Accel partner Zhenya Loginov noted that AI companies have few web-scale search infrastructure options, especially as Google and Microsoft restrict their search APIs. Keenable plans to use the funding to double its 15-person engineering team and is developing a product called WebQueryLanguage to help AI systems combine information from multiple web sources. Styskin acknowledges the high cost of building such an index but sees an opportunity to challenge Google on agentic queries, with competitors including Brave and Exa also active in the space.
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