Keenable Exits Stealth with $26M Seed to Build Web Index for AI Agents
Search infrastructure startup Keenable has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company is developing a web-scale indexing engine tailored specifically for programmatic retrieval by autonomous AI agents and language model workflows rather than human web browsers.
Keenable was co-founded by Andrey Styskin, former head of search, AI, and cloud at Yandex, and Matthias Petri, an AI scientist who previously worked on search infrastructure for Amazon Alexa.
Index Architecture for Agentic Retrieval
Traditional commercial search engines are engineered for human interaction patterns, prioritizing short keyword queries, ranking snippets, and page-level click-through rates. Autonomous AI agents, by contrast, ingest full-text documents, execute iterative multi-step research loops, and require structured grounding data across large context windows.
Keenable has assembled an index of more than 100 billion web documents designed to optimize document extraction speed and narrow candidate search spaces before runtime context loading. The startup is also developing WebQueryLanguage, a querying framework intended to synthesize and combine disparate web sources when single documents do not provide a complete answer.
According to the founders, the API is currently deployed in production pipelines across several AI laboratories and inference providers for both model pre-training data gathering and live inference grounding. The company also announced an integration with conversational voice AI platform Gradium to support real-time retrieval during low-latency audio dialogues.
Market Shift in Web Search APIs
The launch comes amid significant restructuring in the web retrieval market. Major search providers have progressively restricted or retired public programmatic access: Google has modified Custom Search access while Microsoft has deprecated standalone Bing Search API tiers in favor of higher-margin bundled enterprise offerings.
This shift has created room for dedicated retrieval providers such as Brave Search API and Exa. Keenable aims to differentiate itself by optimizing index structures directly for token efficiency and high-volume agent queries to keep per-query ingestion costs sustainable at scale.
Keenable operates with a team of 15 engineers across the United States and Europe, with plans to double headcount by the end of 2026 to expand its commercial API infrastructure.
