A new startup backed by Accel is building a search index designed specifically for AI agents, aiming to replace the traditional web search infrastructure that powers chatbots and other automated systems. Keenable, founded by Andrey Styskin, who previously led Russian search giant Yandex’s search, AI, and cloud division, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri, has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several business angels.
Keenable says it has built a web search index of more than 100 billion documents, and its API is already in production at several AI labs and inference providers for both training and runtime use. The startup declined to name its customers but recently partnered with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval. Styskin, drawing on 20 years of search experience at Yandex and Amazon, said the product differs from enterprise search solutions that become prohibitively expensive at web scale, requiring innovations to narrow the search space quickly based on a query.
Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the investment, said AI companies have few options for web-scale search infrastructure, especially as Google and Microsoft have moved to shut down existing search APIs to avoid cannibalization. Those tech giants are instead pursuing a more bundled approach and being selective about partners. Styskin said those decisions validated the opportunity he saw while at Amazon, where he worked with Petri on web search infrastructure for AI applications such as Alexa, noting Cloudflare data showed AI crawlers accounting for a growing share of search volume.
Keenable is also developing proprietary retrieval capabilities, including an upcoming product called Web Query Language that would help AI systems answer questions by combining information from multiple web sources, even when no single source contains the full answer. Styskin acknowledged that while it is extremely hard to convince people to leave Google for search, the innovators’ dilemma means the U.S. giant is potentially beatable on agentic queries, and a smaller company can offer a more cost-efficient solution to AI companies.
The costs of building a giant search index are significant, with Styskin describing the expense as painfully high but saying the startup is keeping costs in check and pacing itself. With a team of 15 engineering staff across the U.S. and Europe, the company plans to use the fresh funding to double its headcount by the end of the year to build its go-to-market motion. Competitors such as Brave and Exa have also entered the space, and Google is overhauling its search experience for the AI era, signaling that the era of the traditional ten blue links may be ending for both humans and agents.
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