Startup Keenable announced that it had emerged from stealth after raising $26 million in a seed funding round led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several angel investors. The company is building web search and indexing infrastructure designed for AI systems, rather than search engines primarily built to meet the needs of human users.
Keenable is led by Andrey Styskin, who previously headed search, AI, and cloud divisions at Russian company Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri. The company currently has 15 employees distributed across the United States and Europe, and plans to use the new funding to double its headcount by the end of the year, while also developing its commercial operations and reaching customers.
An Index of More Than 100 Billion Documents
Keenable says it has built a web search index containing more than 100 billion documents, and that its API is already being used in production environments by several AI labs and inference service providers, during both training and live operation. The company has not disclosed the names of its customers, but announced a recent partnership with AI-powered audio company Gradium to support direct information retrieval.
The company believes conversational systems produce better results when their answers are grounded in source documents. This use differs from the traditional search-engine model, which was designed to help humans quickly reach a limited number of pages, while intelligent models can read and process larger portions of content to fulfill more complex requests.
What Is the Company Trying to Change?
According to Styskin, the challenge lies not only in collecting web content, but also in rapidly narrowing the search space in a way suited to the type of query. Scanning the entire internet or running an index not optimized for a specific task can be extremely expensive at this scale. For that reason, Keenable is developing its own indexing structures and retrieval capabilities, as well as an upcoming product called Web Query Language, which aims to enable AI systems to assemble an answer from multiple web sources when no single document contains the complete answer.
Why Does This Matter?
Keenable's round comes at a time when AI companies need broad, continuous access to the web, while off-the-shelf search options are becoming less clear. According to Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, Google and Microsoft are taking steps to shut down or restrict existing search APIs to avoid competing with their core services, and are instead moving toward more integrated models and selective partnerships.
This creates an opportunity for independent infrastructure providers, but does not guarantee their success. The company faces high costs to build and operate a massive index, and the market includes competitors such as Brave and Exa, while Google itself is redesigning the search experience for the AI era. Therefore, the confirmed information at present is that Keenable has secured the funding and built infrastructure being used in production; its ability to offer cheaper search or become the “Google for AI agents” remains a future goal not established by the available evidence.