Keenable raises $26M seed for AI agent web search
Accel led Keenable’s $26 million seed round as the startup builds a web index and retrieval APIs for AI agents.
By Colin Brandt · Enterprise Reporter
· 3 min read
Keenable raises $26M in seed funding as it emerges from stealth to build web-search infrastructure for AI agents. Accel led the round, with Conviction Partners and business angels participating, according to TechCrunch; the supplied reports did not state a valuation or revenue.
The startup is pursuing a costly piece of AI infrastructure: an independent index that it says covers more than 100 billion documents, with APIs intended to let AI systems search the web and retrieve cleaned page content. Keenable says the service is being used in production by several AI labs and inference providers for training and runtime, but it has not identified those customers.
What is Keenable building for AI agents?
Keenable is positioning its product around high-frequency, machine-oriented retrieval rather than a search experience designed for people scanning results pages. Its stated use cases include market mapping, price monitoring and lead enrichment. The company says its Search API supports natural-language queries alongside page-content fetching, allowing developers to pass retrieved material into models.
The company also lists Time Machine, an early-access point-in-time search API. It is designed to search earlier versions of web pages and return historical snapshots, rather than only the internet as it appears at the time of a query. A separate Web Query Language product remains in development; Keenable says it is meant to combine information from multiple web sources when no single page supplies a complete answer.
Those products are built on an index that CEO and co-founder Andrey Styskin described to TechCrunch as requiring task-specific structures to avoid the expense of broadly scanning the web for every query. Styskin previously led Yandex’s search, AI and cloud division and later worked on web infrastructure at Amazon AGI. Co-founder and Chief Scientist Matthias Petri also previously worked at Amazon AGI.
Keenable had 15 engineering staff across the U.S. and Europe at the time of the announcement, TechCrunch reported. The company plans to use the new funding to double that headcount by year-end and build its go-to-market operation.
What has Keenable disclosed about pricing and performance?
Keenable’s website advertises p95 latency below 250 milliseconds in U.S. East and Frontier-tier pricing from $1 per 1,000 requests at 100 requests per second or more. Its Agent Builder tier is listed at $4 per 1,000 requests. Those figures, the company’s customer-use statement and its published quality comparisons with other search providers are company claims, not independent performance validation.
Accel partner Zhenya Loginov told TechCrunch that AI companies have relatively few web-scale search infrastructure options as Google and Microsoft move away from existing search APIs. That is the investment case behind Keenable’s bet: owning an index and retrieval layer for agent workloads. It also leaves the startup with the expense of building and maintaining that index, a cost Styskin characterized as painful.
This story draws on original reporting from SiliconANGLE.
