Search engines were built and optimized for people, who can't spare the time or attention required to scan entire webpages. But as people increasingly use AI chatbots to search the web and do tasks, there's a line of thinking that the Internet's current infrastructure needs to be updated to cater to AI instead, as these bots can read and process much larger portions of information. Andrey Styskin, who previously led Russian search giant Yandex's search, AI and cloud division, and German AI scientist Matthias Petri are working to solve that problem with their new startup, Keenable .
The company recently came out of stealth $26 million in seed funding. Accel led the funding round, which also saw participation from Conviction Partners and some business angels. From Styskin's perspective, AI chatbots tend to do much better if they can ground their responses with source documents. “This actually creates a new flywheel that is different from what Google learned from human behavior,” he told TechCrunch.
Keenable says it 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 wouldn't disclose who its customers are, but it recently struck a partnership with voice AI company Gradium to support live information retrieval. Drawing from his experience of 20 years building search at Yandex and Amazon, Styskin explained how Keenable's product is different from enterprise search solutions that can break down and prove very costly at web scale.
"If you do not fine-tune your index structures for a specific task, the cost of serving and scanning the whole internet is enormous because of the volume. That's why you need to innovate on how you can narrow the search space based on your query very fast. This is what we are bringing to the table," he said. 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.