Keenable, a startup founded by former Yandex and Amazon search leaders, has emerged from stealth with a $26 million seed round led by Accel. The San Francisco-based company is building independent web search infrastructure designed specifically for artificial intelligence models and agents. Its platform aims to provide AI systems with more efficient and affordable access to live information across the web.
Building Search for AI Agents
Conventional search engines were optimized for people who scan a limited number of links, while AI agents can issue repeated queries during complex tasks. That behavior creates substantially greater search volume and makes traditional search and page-fetching APIs costly when deployed continuously at AI scale. Keenable says its infrastructure is built to make those searches an order of magnitude more cost-efficient than legacy systems.
An Independent Web Index
Keenable has built an independent search index containing more than 100 billion documents. The index is designed for how AI agents retrieve and reason over information rather than for presenting a list of human-oriented links. The company also points to restrictions on third-party access to search APIs from major technology providers as a growing challenge for AI developers.
Web Query Language for Complex Answers
Keenable is developing retrieval technologies on top of its index, including an upcoming product called Web Query Language for AI. This system is intended to let models retrieve, combine, and reason over information from thousands of sources across the live web. It targets questions where no single webpage or structured database contains the complete answer.
Founders and Commercial Traction
Andrey Styskin and Matthias Petri founded Keenable in 2025 after previously building large-scale search infrastructure at Yandex and Amazon AGI. Styskin served as CEO of Yandex Search and later as a director at Amazon AGI, while Petri worked as a principal applied scientist. Keenable says its API is already used in production by AI labs and inference providers, and it has secured commercial contracts with multiple model developers.
Funding and Growth Plans
The $26 million seed round was led by Accel with participation from Conviction and angel investors from Amazon, ClickHouse, Databricks, Google, Snowflake, and SpaceXAI. Accel partner Zhenya Loginov said current search systems were never designed for the way models access and use information. Keenable plans to use the capital to double its roughly 15-person engineering team across the Bay Area and Europe by the end of the year.
Strategic Timing for the AI Era
Keenable argues that as models become more capable, access to external knowledge will become a critical way to improve performance without requiring every fact to be encoded in model parameters. The startup wants AI systems to continuously retrieve higher-quality and more current knowledge while they work. Styskin believes the traditional ten blue links model may give way to agentic querying, creating an opening for independent search infrastructure.
Keenable is entering a competitive landscape where other independent players and large technology companies are also rethinking search for the agentic era. Its early commercial traction and the backing of Accel suggest that investors see web-scale retrieval as foundational infrastructure for the next wave of AI. With fresh capital and experienced founders, the startup aims to become a key knowledge layer for AI systems that need continuous access to the live web.