The ten blue links were built for humans with limited attention spans. AI agents don’t have that problem. They can chew through entire web pages without blinking, which means the search infrastructure they need looks fundamentally different from what Google spent two decades optimizing. Andrey Styskin spent 20 years building search at Yandex and Amazon, and he’s betting that difference is big enough to justify a new player.
Styskin’s startup, Keenable, just emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and several angels. The company has already indexed more than 100 billion documents and claims its API is in production at multiple AI labs and inference providers, though it won’t name names. Styskin argues that grounding chatbot responses in source documents creates ‘a new flywheel that is different from what Google learned from human behavior.’ That’s the core bet: search optimized for machine consumption, not human eyeballs.
The timing helps. Accel partner Zhenya Loginov, who led the investment, points out that Google and Microsoft are shutting down or bundling their search APIs to avoid cannibalizing their own AI products. That leaves AI companies with few options for web-scale retrieval infrastructure. Styskin knows the cost problem intimately. ‘If you do not fine-tune your index structures for a specific task, the cost of serving and scanning the whole internet is enormous,’ he said. Keenable’s answer includes a proprietary query language designed to let AI systems stitch together answers from multiple sources when no single page contains the full picture.
Keenable isn’t alone. Brave and Exa are chasing similar territory, and Google is overhauling its own search experience for the agent era. Styskin admits the index buildout is ‘painfully expensive’ and that prying people away from Google for traditional search is ‘extremely hard.’ But he thinks agentic queries are where the incumbent is beatable. With only 15 engineers and plans to double headcount by year’s end, the company is pacing itself. Whether that’s enough to outrun the giants is an open question, but the fact that Google itself is rethinking the blue links suggests Styskin may be onto something.
