A startup founded by the former head of Yandex’s search and AI division has come out of stealth with $26M in seed funding to build a web search index designed for AI agents rather than human eyeballs.
Accel led the round in Keenable, with Conviction Partners and business angels participating. Founder Andrey Styskin, who spent two decades on search at Yandex and Amazon, and co-founder Matthias Petri argue that chatbots perform far better when they ground responses in source documents, creating a search economy that behaves differently from Google’s.
Keenable says it has indexed more than 100 billion documents, and its API is already in production at several AI labs and inference providers for both training and runtime use. The startup declined to name customers but recently partnered with voice AI company Gradium for live information retrieval.
The company is also building Web Query Language, a retrieval product that answers questions by combining information across web sources when no single page holds the full answer.
Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the investment, said AI companies have few options for web-scale search infrastructure as Google and Microsoft restrict access to their search APIs. Styskin cites Cloudflare data showing AI crawlers account for a growing share of search volume, and argues the giants are beatable on agentic queries even if consumer search remains locked down.
