Accel-backed Keenable is indexing the web for AI agents

Search was built for humans skimming, not for software reading whole pages. That gap is where Keenable wants to live. The startup, led by former Yandex search chief Andrey Styskin and German AI scientist Matthias Petri, has just emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding. Accel led the round, with Conviction Partners and some business angels joining in.

Keenable’s pitch is simple enough to say and harder to build: AI systems work better when they can ground answers in source documents. Styskin argues that creates a different feedback loop from the one Google learned from human behavior. The company says its web index already covers more than 100 billion documents, and its API is already running in production at several AI labs and inference providers for both training and runtime.

The startup won’t name those customers, but it did announce a partnership with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval. It is also building proprietary retrieval tools, including an upcoming product called WebQueryLanguage, meant to help AI systems assemble answers from several web sources when no single page has everything.

The timing matters. Accel partner Zhenya Loginov said AI companies have few real options for web-scale search infrastructure, especially as Google and Microsoft move to shut down their existing search APIs rather than keep feeding potential cannibalization. And Styskin, who spent 20 years building search at Yandex and Amazon, says he saw the opening when AI crawlers started taking up more of the web’s search traffic.

But this is still a brutal business. Styskin says building a giant search index is “painfully expensive,” and Keenable is trying to keep costs under control while it grows. The company has 15 engineering staff across the U.S. and Europe and plans to double headcount by the end of the year to build out its go-to-market work. It is also entering a crowded field, with Brave and Exa already in the mix, while Google itself reshapes search for the AI era.