Accel-Backed Keenable Builds Web Index for AI Agents

Keenable came out of stealth this week with $26 million in seed funding, led by Accel with participation from Conviction Partners and a handful of angels. The startup is building a search index meant for AI agents rather than humans, on the theory that Google's decades of ranking pages for human eyeballs don't translate well to chatbots that can ingest and process far more text at once. The company, co-founded by Andrey Styskin, who ran search, AI and cloud at Yandex, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri, says its index already covers more than 100 billion documents.

Its API is running in production at several AI labs and inference providers, both for training models and for live queries, though Keenable declined to name which ones. One partnership it has confirmed: voice AI company Gradium, which uses Keenable for live information retrieval. Styskin argues that chatbots produce better answers when they can point to source documents, and that this need is creating a different kind of demand loop than the one Google spent years optimizing around human click behavior.

Styskin's background, 20 years building search infrastructure at Yandex and Amazon, shapes how he positions Keenable against existing enterprise search tools.