Keenable, a startup founded by Andrey Styskin, former leader of Yandex’s search, AI, and cloud division, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri, aims to update the internet’s infrastructure to cater to AI agents rather than human users. The company recently emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and business angels. Keenable has built a web search index of over 100 billion documents, and its API is already in production use at several AI labs and inference providers for both training and runtime purposes [https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/25/accel-backed-keenable-is-indexing-the-web-for-ai-agents/].
Styskin argues that AI chatbots perform better when they can ground their responses with source documents, creating a new feedback loop distinct from the one Google optimized for human behavior. Keenable’s product differentiates itself from enterprise search solutions by fine-tuning index structures for specific tasks to reduce the cost of serving and scanning the entire internet at web scale. The startup is also developing proprietary retrieval capabilities, including an upcoming product called Web Query Language, which would enable AI systems to answer questions by synthesizing information from various web sources. Despite the high costs associated with building a large search index, Keenable plans to use its fresh funding to double its engineering headcount by year-end to build its go-to-market strategy, positioning itself as a potential alternative to Google for AI-driven search queries.