Keenable, a startup building web search infrastructure designed for AI agents rather than human users, emerged from stealth in August 2026 with a $26 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several business angels.
The company was co-founded by Andrey Styskin, who previously led search, AI, and cloud at Russian search engine Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri. The two worked together on web search infrastructure for AI applications including Alexa while at Amazon. Keenable operates with a team of 15 engineers across the U.S. and Europe, and plans to use the new funding to double its headcount by the end of the year.
Keenable says it has built a web search index of more than 100 billion documents. Its API is already in use at several AI labs and inference providers for both training and runtime applications, though the company has not disclosed customer names. It recently announced a partnership with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval.
The startup’s premise is that existing search infrastructure was optimized for human behavior, while AI agents can process far larger volumes of information and benefit from being grounded in source documents. Styskin said the key technical challenge is narrowing the search space quickly enough to make web-scale retrieval cost-effective. Keenable is also developing a product called WebQueryLanguage, which would allow AI systems to answer questions by synthesizing information from multiple web sources.
According to Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, AI companies have limited options for web-scale search infrastructure, partly because Google and Microsoft have moved to restrict access to their existing search APIs in favor of more selective, bundled arrangements.
Keenable faces competition from other players in the space, including Brave and Exa, as well as Google’s own efforts to adapt its search product for the AI era.
Source: TechCrunch