Keenable has emerged from stealth with a $26 million seed round led by Accel to build web-search and retrieval infrastructure designed for AI agents rather than human users. The round included participation from Conviction Partners and business angels.
The company was founded by Andrey Styskin, who previously led Yandex’s search, AI, and cloud division, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri; both bring roughly two decades of search infrastructure experience from Yandex and Amazon.
Keenable’s product and roadmap
Keenable has built an independent index of more than 100 billion documents and offers a low-latency Search API, page-content retrieval and an MCP interface, which are already used in production by several undisclosed AI labs and inference providers. The startup is also developing a “Time Machine” for querying historical web snapshots and a Web Query Language intended to let AI systems stitch together answers from multiple sources. In July 2026 it struck a live-retrieval partnership with voice-AI company Gradium.
Market context and business model
As Google and Microsoft retire or bundle their standalone search APIs, AI players face limited web-scale search options and legacy “ten blue links” search was not built for machine consumption. Keenable competes with Brave and Exa in this emerging space. The company currently has 15 engineers across the US and Europe and plans to double headcount by the end of 2026 while building out its go-to-market, using a pay-as-you-go plus dedicated-capacity commercial model.
