Octen, a startup developing software for AI agents to search the web, has launched with $10 million in seed funding, led by Square Peg and joined by Argor and AI researchers.
While existing search engines can be used by AI agents, their performance is limited as they are designed for human users. Octen addresses this with a search engine built specifically for AI agents, accessible via an API. The company claims it is the fastest on the market, answering benchmark questions in a median of 62 milliseconds, over four times faster than rivals.
Octen's service allows AI agents to break down searches into multiple queries processed in parallel, significantly speeding up results. The infrastructure can handle over one million queries per second per customer.
Beyond web searches, Octen's API supports other data retrieval tasks, such as generating stock performance reports for financial institutions. The company also offers cloud-hosted algorithms for generating AI embeddings, with Octen-Embedding-8B setting a record on a data retrieval benchmark.
"Octen is enabling a new milestone in AI applications by allowing agents to reason over the live web with the same speed and fluidity as memory," said CEO Kuan Zou. The seed funding is being used to expand engineering and developer relations teams, and acquire infrastructure for its globally distributed backend.
The search API is currently in an invite-only beta program, being tested by multiple AI software providers.