The San Francisco startup is betting that AI agents need their own search index, not the one built for humans clicking through ten blue links.
A startup called Keenable has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding and a bold premise: the search infrastructure powering today’s web was designed for people, not for the billions of automated queries that AI agents are about to unleash.
The seed round, which closed on November 5, 2025, was backed by Accel, Conviction Partners, Brightwing Capital, and ScOp Venture Capital. Angel investors from Google and Amazon also participated.
What Keenable actually does #
At its core, Keenable maintains an independent web search index spanning more than 100 billion documents. Keenable’s approach optimizes for low-latency, high-frequency queries that AI agents need, with use cases including lead enrichment, market mapping, and pricing monitoring.
The company offers APIs that support straightforward language searches and cleaned content fetching, delivering model-ready inputs with minimal delay. Pricing starts at free trial tiers and scales to $1 per 1,000 API requests for what the company calls “frontier-scale” users.
Keenable also includes point-in-time historical queries, meaning AI systems can search the web as it existed at a specific moment rather than only accessing current results.
The team behind the index #
CEO Andrey Styskin previously ran Yandex’s search division. Chief Scientist Matthias Petri comes from Amazon AGI, where his work focused on retrieval systems.
Keenable claims its quality performance already surpasses peers like Tavily, Exa, and Perplexity in terms of delivering relevant, clean results optimized for machine consumption.
Why this matters now #
Right now, most AI agents either rely on traditional search engine APIs or build their own crawling infrastructure. Keenable is positioning itself as a dedicated index that handles the hard parts so AI developers can focus on building their agents rather than their search stack.
Initial users reportedly include AI labs already running the service in production, though specific names haven’t been disclosed. The unified access point for integration suggests Keenable is designing for easy adoption.
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