Accel-Backed Keenable Indexes the Web for AI Agents

Accel-backed Keenable has exited stealth with a $26 million seed funding round to develop web search infrastructure purpose-built for artificial intelligence agents. Led by Accel, the investment includes participation from Conviction Partners and independent angels. The startup is co-founded by Andrey Styskin, former head of search, AI, and cloud at Yandex and ex-Amazon executive, alongside German AI scientist Matthias Petri. Operating with an engineering team distributed across the United States and Europe, Keenable aims to replace legacy search architectures optimized for human browsing with systems designed to process and retrieve data at machine scale. The company is currently maintaining a proprietary web index exceeding 100 billion documents. Its application programming interface is already deployed in production environments across multiple AI laboratories and inference providers for both model training and runtime execution. To address the fragmentation of information across the open web, Keenable is developing WebQueryLanguage, a proprietary retrieval tool that enables AI systems to synthesize answers from multiple sources when a single webpage does not contain a complete response. The startup recently formalized a partnership with voice AI developer Gradium to power live information retrieval. Founders Styskin and Petri identified the market gap after observing the growing volume of AI-driven web traffic and the strategic pivot by major technology firms. Recognizing that Google and Microsoft are increasingly restricting public search APIs to protect their ecosystems, Keenable positions itself as a specialized, cost-efficient alternative for enterprise AI workloads. Styskin notes that traditional enterprise search solutions become prohibitively expensive when applied to web-scale data without query-specific optimization. Keenable addresses this by engineering its index structures to rapidly narrow search spaces based on complex prompts, reducing computational overhead. The seed capital will fund a strategic expansion, with leadership targeting a doubling of its engineering headcount by the end of the calendar year to accelerate product development and commercial rollout. While Styskin acknowledges the immense capital requirements of maintaining a global search index, he argues that incumbent search providers face an innovator dilemma that leaves their platforms vulnerable to AI-native architectures. The broader industry shift, evidenced by competitive entries from providers like Brave and Exa, signals a structural transition away from traditional result formats. Keenable intends to capitalize on this infrastructure gap by delivering high-throughput, agentic-ready search capabilities to the next generation of machine-driven applications.