Accel-backed Keenable emerges from stealth with $26M to build web search for AI agents

Styskin, who spent two decades building search at Yandex and Amazon, said AI chatbots perform better when they can ground responses in source documents. “This actually creates a new flywheel that is different from what Google learned from human behavior,” he told TechCrunch. He argued that without fine-tuning index structures for specific tasks, serving and scanning the entire internet is enormously costly, so Keenable works to narrow the search space quickly based on the query.

Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the investment, said AI players have few options for web-scale search infrastructure, especially as Google and Microsoft move to shut down their existing search APIs to avoid cannibalization and instead favor bundled partnerships. Styskin said the decisions confirmed an opportunity he saw while working with Petri at Amazon on search infrastructure for AI applications such as Alexa. He pointed to Cloudflare data showing AI crawlers account for a growing share of search volume.

Keenable is also building proprietary retrieval capabilities, including an upcoming product called WebQueryLanguage that would help AI systems answer questions by combining information from multiple web sources even when no single source contains the full answer. Styskin tapped his network to hire former colleagues for the startup. Asked about costs, he said building a giant search index is “painfully expensive,” but the startup is trying to keep costs in check and pace itself. With 15 engineering staff across the U.S. and Europe, it plans to double headcount by the end of the year to build its go-to-market motion.

Styskin acknowledged that convincing people to move away from Google for search is extremely hard, but said the innovators’ dilemma means Google is potentially “beatable” on agentic queries and a smaller company can offer a more cost-efficient solution. Other players such as Brave and Exa have entered the space, and Google is overhauling its search experience for the AI era. The broader motion, he suggested, signals the era of the “ten blue links” may be ending for both humans and agents.