Accel-backed Keenable is indexing the web for AI agents
Keenable, a startup backed by Accel, is building a web search index for AI agents. The company has raised $26 million in seed funding and is working to provide a cost-efficient solution to AI companies.
Intelligence analysis by Llama
Keenable is building a web search index for AI agents, which can ground their responses with source documents. The company has raised $26 million in seed funding and is working to provide a cost-efficient solution to AI companies.
Imagine you're trying to find a specific book in a huge library. A traditional search engine would look through every book, but a new search engine called Keenable is like a super-smart librarian that can find the book you want quickly and efficiently. This is because Keenable is building a web search index specifically for AI agents, which can ground their responses with source documents.
Analysis
A New Era for Web Search Indexing
Keenable, a startup backed by Accel, is working to revolutionize the way AI systems interact with the web. The company has raised $26 million in seed funding and is building a web search index for AI agents. This index is designed to provide a cost-efficient solution to AI companies, which can ground their responses with source documents.
According to Andrey Styskin, the CEO of Keenable, AI chatbots tend to do much better if they can ground their responses with source documents. This is because the current infrastructure of the web is built with humans in mind, and AI systems require a different approach. Styskin believes that Keenable's product is different from enterprise search solutions that can break down and prove very costly at web scale.
Keenable's product is designed to narrow the search space based on the query very fast, which is what Styskin believes is necessary for web-scale search infrastructure. The company has been building a web search index of more than 100 billion documents, and its API is already used in production at several AI labs and inference providers during both training and runtime.
The startup has recently struck a partnership with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval. According to Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the investment, AI players have very few options when it comes to web-scale search infrastructure, especially with Google and Microsoft taking steps to shut down their existing search APIs to avoid cannibalization.
Styskin believes that these decisions confirmed the opportunity he saw when he was at Amazon, working with Petri on web search infrastructure for AI applications such as Alexa. He'd seen Cloudflare data that AI crawlers were responsible for a growing share of search volume, and started realizing that there was an opportunity to develop web search infrastructure that is built with AI in mind.
Keenable is not the only player in this space. Other players have entered the space, such as Brave and Exa, and Google itself is overhauling its search experience for the AI era. However, Keenable's conviction is shared at the Googleplex: whether it's for humans or for agents, the era of the 'ten blue links' may be coming to a close.
A Cost-Efficient Solution
Keenable's product is designed to be cost-efficient, which is a major advantage over other solutions. According to Styskin, the costs of building a giant search index are real, but the startup is doing its best to keep costs in check and pace itself.
With a team of 15 engineering staff across the U.S. and Europe, the company plans to use the fresh cash to double its headcount by the end of the year to build its go-to-market motion. There are many more steps before the startup can achieve its dream of becoming 'the next Google for AI agents'.
Key points
- Keenable is building a web search index for AI agents, which can ground their responses with source documents.
- The company has raised $26 million in seed funding and is working to provide a cost-efficient solution to AI companies.
- Keenable's product is designed to narrow the search space based on the query very fast, which is what Styskin believes is necessary for web-scale search infrastructure.
- The startup has been building a web search index of more than 100 billion documents, and its API is already used in production at several AI labs and inference providers during both training and runtime.
Keenable's web search index for AI agents has the potential to revolutionize the way AI systems interact with the web, making it more efficient and cost-effective. If successful, Keenable could become a major player in the AI industry, providing a cost-efficient solution to AI companies.
However, Keenable faces significant competition in the market, and it will be a challenge for the company to differentiate itself from other players. Additionally, the costs of building a giant search index are real, and Keenable will need to keep costs in check and pace itself to achieve its goals.
