Keenable Raised $26 Million Seed Round

Keenable, a startup building web-search and retrieval infrastructure for AI agents rather than human users, has come out of stealth with a $26 million seed round led by Accel, with 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 bringing roughly two decades of search infrastructure experience from Yandex and Amazon.

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, already used in production by several undisclosed AI labs and inference providers. It’s also developing a “Time Machine” for querying historical web snapshots and a Web Query Language that would let AI systems stitch together answers from multiple sources. In July 2026, it struck a live-retrieval partnership with voice-AI company Gradium.

As Google and Microsoft retire or bundle their standalone search APIs, and many of us remember Fast, Search & Transfer, Exalead, AI players have few web-scale search options, and legacy “ten blue links” search wasn’t built for machine consumption. Keenable competes with Brave and Exa in this emerging space. With 15 engineers across the US and Europe, the company plans to double headcount by end of 2026 while building out go-to-market, using a pay-as-you-go plus dedicated-capacity commercial model.